Mike Tyers from the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada and colleagues from other institutions in Canada and the USA, read over 30,000 publications on S. cerevisiae and recorded over 22,000 protein interactions and over 11,000 genetic interactions. Surprisingly, Tyers and colleagues found less than 20% overlap between their literature dataset and the datasets generated using high-throughput methods for interaction detection, indicating that many more interactions are likely to be discovered.
Tyers and colleagues' database will enable researchers to gain further insight into individual gene functions and biological network features in yeast, and by extension other species including humans. Their study also shows that it is possible to search and sort a large amount of existing knowledge from the literature within a relatively short time frame. This approach could be applied to other organisms, from E. Coli to humans.
The literature interaction dataset is publicly available at the BioGRID database (http://thebiogrid.org/) and at the Saccharomyces Genome Database (http://www.yeastgenome.org/).
Article:
Comprehensive curation and analysis of global interaction networks in Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Teresa Reguly, Ashton Breitkreutz, Lorrie Boucher, Bobby-Joe Breitkreutz, Gary C Hon, Chad L Myers, Ainslie Parsons, Helena Friesen, Rose Oughtred, Amy Tong, Chris Stark, Yuen Ho, David Botstein, Brenda Andrews, Charles Boone, Olga G Troyanskya, Trey Ideker, Kara Dolinski, Nizar N Batadaand Mike Tyers
Journal of Biology 2006, 5:11 (8 June 2006)
After the embargo, article available at: http://jbiol.com/content/5/4/11
Journal Website: http://jbiol.com/home/
Journal
Journal of Biology