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Are the datasets comparable?

Posted by peteruetz on 26 Oct 2012 at 05:37 GMT

Even if you take into account incompleteness, I would argue that current datasets are hardly comparable as they have been produced not only in different species, but also with different methods that produce non-overlapping data with a large false negative rate. Take a look at this paper and you will see what I mean:

http://www.nature.com/nme...

Also, based on this paper I would also argue that the yeast interactome is still far from complete (but probably has lots of false positives). For instance, there hasn't even been a serious attempt to map all membrane protein interactions (except for Miller et al 2005 in PNAS, I believe).

It is obviously difficult, but I wonder how this analysis would look like when only PPIs are considered that are known to be of some relevance. Note that I DO believe that there are lots of bona fide PPIs that are NOT relevant to the cell :)

No competing interests declared.