TY - JOUR
T1 - Estimating the size of the human interactome
AU - Stumpf, Michael P.H.
AU - Thorne, Thomas
AU - De Silva, Eric
AU - Stewart, Ronald
AU - Hyeong, Jun An
AU - Lappe, Michael
AU - Wiuf, Carsten
PY - 2008/5/13
Y1 - 2008/5/13
N2 - After the completion of the human and other genome projects it emerged that the number of genes in organisms as diverse as fruit flies, nematodes, and humans does not reflect our perception of their relative complexity. Here, we provide reliable evidence that the size of protein interaction networks in different organisms appears to correlate much better with their apparent biological complexity. We develop a stable and powerful, yet simple, statistical procedure to estimate the size of the whole network from subnet data. This approach is then applied to a range of eukaryotic organisms for which extensive protein interaction data have been collected and we estimate the number of interactions in humans to be ≈650,000. We find that the human interaction network is one order of magnitude bigger than the Drosophila melanogaster interactome and ≈3 times bigger than in Caenorhabditis elegans.
AB - After the completion of the human and other genome projects it emerged that the number of genes in organisms as diverse as fruit flies, nematodes, and humans does not reflect our perception of their relative complexity. Here, we provide reliable evidence that the size of protein interaction networks in different organisms appears to correlate much better with their apparent biological complexity. We develop a stable and powerful, yet simple, statistical procedure to estimate the size of the whole network from subnet data. This approach is then applied to a range of eukaryotic organisms for which extensive protein interaction data have been collected and we estimate the number of interactions in humans to be ≈650,000. We find that the human interaction network is one order of magnitude bigger than the Drosophila melanogaster interactome and ≈3 times bigger than in Caenorhabditis elegans.
KW - Evolutionary systems biology
KW - Network evolution
KW - Network inference
KW - Network sampling theory
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=44349113144&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1073/pnas.0708078105
DO - 10.1073/pnas.0708078105
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 18474861
AN - SCOPUS:44349113144
SN - 0027-8424
VL - 105
SP - 6959
EP - 6964
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
IS - 19
ER -