PRIMOS: An integrated platform for exploring protein-protein interactions

The knowledge of protein-protein interactions (PPIs) is of prominent importance for modelling cellular processes, understanding of diseases and functional interpretation of post-genomic data. However, it is an elaborate task to obtain knowledge for specific proteins because it is spread over several databases. The Protein Interaction and Molecule Search (PRIMOS) platform integrates PPI data from several major PPI databases and thus eases knowledge acquisition considerably. Data integration is accomplished by mapping every interacting protein to its corresponding protein in UniProt, which makes the different PPI datasets comparable and allows detecting both congruent and conflicting information. Every imported PPI is reassessed by a homology-based validation scheme, which helps scientists to distinguish between trustworthy PPIs and false-positive PPIs that are frequently contained in today's PPI databases. The integrated dataset can be explored through a sophisticated Web interface and can be visualized within the PRIMOS Interaction Viewer. PRIMOS is publicly available online at http://primos.fh-hagenberg.at.