How complete are current yeast and human protein-interaction networks?

G Traver Hart¹, Arun K Ramani¹^,2 and Edward M Marcotte¹

¹Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology, Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology, University of Texas at Austin, 2500 Speedway, Austin, TX 78712, USA

²The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SA, UK

author email corresponding author email

Genome Biology 2006, 7:120doi:10.1186/gb-2006-7-11-120


Published:	1 December 2006

Subject areas: Bioinformatics, Genome studies, Model organisms, Methods, Molecular biology

Abstract

We estimate the full yeast protein-protein interaction network to contain 37,800-75,500 interactions and the human network 154,000-369,000, but owing to a high false-positive rate, current maps are roughly only 50% and 10% complete, respectively. Paradoxically, releasing raw, unfiltered assay data might help separate true from false interactions.