Protein-protein interaction databases: keeping up with growing interactomes

Over the past few years, the number of known protein-protein interactions has increased substantially. To make this information more readily available, a number of publicly available databases have set out to collect and store protein-protein interaction data. Protein-protein interactions have been retrieved from six major databases, integrated and the results compared. The six databases (the Biological General Repository for Interaction Datasets [BioGRID], the Molecular INTeraction database [MINT], the Biomolecular Interaction Network Database [BIND], the Database of Interacting Proteins [DIP], the IntAct molecular interaction database [IntAct] and the Human Protein Reference Database [HPRD]) differ in scope and content; integration of all datasets is non-trivial owing to differences in data annotation. With respect to human protein-protein interaction data, HPRD seems to be the most comprehensive. To obtain a complete dataset, however, interactions from all six databases have to be combined. To overcome this limitation, meta-databases such as the Agile Protein Interaction Database (APID) offer access to integrated protein-protein interaction datasets, although these also currently have certain restrictions.