The bounty and challenges of interaction proteomics

Prof. Shoshana J Wodak

Professor Wodak is the scientific director of the Center for Computational Biology in Toronto, Canada, and a professor in Biochemistry and Medical Genetics at the University of Toronto. She is the author of more than 100 original research papers and has an h-index of citation of 45.

The recent explosion of high throughput experimental technologies for characterizing protein interactions has generated large amounts of data describing interactions between thousands of proteins and producing genome scale views of protein assemblies. The systems-level views afforded by these interaction networks hold great promise of leading to new knowledge, but also involve many challenges. Deriving meaningful biological conclusions from these views crucially depends on our understanding of the approximation and the biases associated in deriving and interpreting the data. In my talk I’ll review the major techniques for large-scale characterization of protein interactions and describe the key role played by computational methods for processing, analyzing, and validating the large body of noisy data produced by these techniques. In addition I will summarize the current status of literature curated protein interaction data stored in public databases, which are increasingly used to derive new biological knowledge.

Pr Shoshana J Wodak

2011/10/11