LinkedPPI: Enabling Intuitive, Integrative Protein-Protein Interaction Discovery

Abstract. Understanding the dynamics of protein-protein interactions (PPIs) is a cardinal step for studying human diseases at the molecular level. Advances in “sequencing ” technologies have resulted in a deluge of biological data related to gene and protein expression, yet our knowledge of PPI networks is far from complete. The lack of an integrated vocab-ulary makes querying this data difficult for domain users, whereas the large volume makes it difficult for intuitive exploration. In this paper we employ Linked Data technologies to develop a framework ‘LinkedPPI’ to facilitate domain researchers in integrative PPI discovery. We demon-strate the semantic integration of various data sources pertaining to bi-ological interactions, expression and functions using a domain-specific model. We deploy a platform which enables search and aggregative visu-alization in real-time. We finally showcase three user scenarios to depict how our approach can help identify potential interactions between pro-teins, domains and genomic segments