Beyond hairballs: The use of quantitative mass spectrometry data to understand protein-protein interactions

The past 10 years have witnessed a dramatic proliferation in the availability of protein interaction data. However, for interaction mapping based on affinity purification coupled with mass spectrometry (AP-MS), there is a wealth of information present in the datasets that often goes unrecorded in public repositories, and as such remains largely unexplored. Further, how this type of data is represented and used by bioinformaticians has not been well established. Here, we point out some common mistakes in how AP-MS data are handled, and describe how protein complex organization and interaction dynamics can be inferred using quantitative AP-MS approaches.