Construction of a pig physical interactome using sequence homology and a comprehensive reference human interactome

The analysis of interaction networks is crucial for understanding molecular function and has an essential impact for genomewide studies. However, the interactomes of most species are largely incomplete and computational strategies that take into account sequence homology can help compensating for this lack of information using cross-species analysis. In this work we report the construction of a porcine interactome resource. We applied sequence homology matching and carried out bi-directional BLASTp searches for the currently available protein sequence collections of human and pig. Using this homology we were able to recover, on average, 71% of the proteins annotated for human pathways for the pig. Porcine protein-protein interactions were deduced from homologous proteins with known interactions in human. The result of this work is a resource comprising 204,699 predicted porcine interactions that can be used in genome analyses in order to enhance functional interpretation of data. The data can be visualized and downloaded from http://cpdb.molgen.mpg.de/pig