Experimental and bioinformatic approaches for interrogating protein–protein interactions to determine protein function

An ambitious goal of proteomics is to elucidate the structure, interactions and functions of all proteins within cells and organisms. One strategy to determine protein function is to identify the protein–protein interactions. The increasing use of high-throughput and large-scale bioinformatics-based studies has generated a massive amount of data stored in a number of different databases. A challenge for bioinformatics is to explore this disparate data and to uncover biologically relevant interactions and pathways. In parallel, there is clearly a need for the development of approaches that can predict novel protein–protein interaction networks in silico. Here, we present an overview of different experimental and bioinformatic methods to elucidate protein–protein interactions.