Estimating the size of the human interactome

Michael P.H. Stumpf; Thomas Thorne; Eric De Silva; Ronald Stewart; Jun An Hyeong; Michael Lappe; Carsten Wiuf

doi:10.1073/pnas.0708078105

Estimating the size of the human interactome

Michael P.H. Stumpf, Thomas Thorne, Eric De Silva, Ronald Stewart, Jun An Hyeong, Michael Lappe, Carsten Wiuf

Department of Mathematical Sciences

515 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

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.

Original language	English
Journal	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Volume	105
Issue number	19
Pages (from-to)	6959-6964
Number of pages	6
ISSN	0027-8424
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0708078105
Publication status	Published - 13 May 2008

Keywords

Evolutionary systems biology
Network evolution
Network inference
Network sampling theory

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10.1073/pnas.0708078105

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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

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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

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Estimating the size of the human interactome

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Keywords

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