Strategies towards high-quality binary protein interactome maps

Many processes in a cell depend on protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and perturbations of these interactions can lead to diseases. Comprehensive knowledge of PPI networks will not only give us information on how the cell is organized, but will also provide new drug targets. Current binary PPI networks are mainly generated by high-throughput yeast two-hybrid. Due to the small overlap of these maps, it has long been assumed that these maps are of low quality containing many false positives. However, by using an orthogonal two-hybrid method, MAPPIT (mammalian protein-protein interaction trap), these maps were shown to be of high quality suggesting that the limited overlap is likely due to low sensitivity and not to low specificity.