Article,
What Evidence Is There for the Homology of Protein-Protein Interactions?
PLoS Comput Biol, 8 (9): e1002645+ (Sep 20, 2012)
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002645
Abstract
The notion that sequence homology implies functional similarity underlies much of computational biology. In the case of protein-protein interactions, an interaction can be inferred between two proteins on the basis that sequence-similar proteins have been observed to interact. The use of transferred interactions is common, but the legitimacy of such inferred interactions is not clear. Here we investigate transferred interactions and whether data incompleteness explains the lack of evidence found for them. Using definitions of homology associated with functional annotation transfer, we estimate that conservation rates of interactions are low even after taking interactome incompleteness into account. For example, at a blastp -value threshold of , we estimate the conservation rate to be about between S. cerevisiae and H. sapiens. Our method also produces estimates of interactome sizes (which are similar to those previously proposed). Using our estimates of interaction conservation we estimate the rate at which protein-protein interactions are lost across species. To our knowledge, this is the first such study based on large-scale data. Previous work has suggested that interactions transferred within species are more reliable than interactions transferred across species. By controlling for factors that are specific to within-species interaction prediction, we propose that the transfer of interactions within species might be less reliable than transfers between species. Protein-protein interactions appear to be very rarely conserved unless very high sequence similarity is observed. Consequently, inferred interactions should be used with care. It is widely assumed that knowledge gained in one species can be transferred to another species, even among species that are widely separated on the tree of life. This transfer is often done at the level of proteins under the assumption that if two proteins have similar sequences, they will share similar properties. In this paper, we investigate the validity of this assumption for the case of protein-protein interactions. The transfer of protein interactions across species is a common procedure and it is known to have shortcomings but these are generally ascribed to the incompleteness of protein interaction data. We introduce a framework to take such incomplete information into account, and under its assumptions show that the procedure is unreliable when using sequence-similarity thresholds typically thought to allow the transfer of functional information. Our results imply that, unless using strict definitions of homology, interactions rewire at a rate too fast to allow reliable transfer across species. We urge caution in interpreting the results of such transfers.
