Prediction of protein interactions is essential for studying
biomolecular mechanisms
Abstract
Structural characterization of protein interactions is essential for our
ability to understand and modulate physiological processes.
Computational approaches to modeling of protein complexes provide
structural information that far exceeds capabilities of the existing
experimental techniques. Protein structure prediction in general, and
prediction of protein interactions in particular, has been
revolutionized by the rapid progress in Deep Learning techniques. The
work of Schweke et al. presents a community-wide study of an important
problem of distinguishing physiological protein-protein
complexes/interfaces (experimentally determined or modeled) from
non-physiological ones. The authors designed and generated a large
benchmark set of physiological and non-physiological homodimeric
complexes, and evaluated a large set of scoring functions, as well as
AlphaFold predictions, on their ability to discriminate the
non-physiological interfaces. The problem of separating physiological
interfaces from non-physiological ones is very difficult, largely due to
the lack of a clear distinction between the two categories in a crowded
environment inside a living cell. Still, the ability to identify key
physiologically significant interfaces in the variety of possible
configurations of a protein-protein complex is important. The study
presents a major data resource and methodological development in this
important direction for molecular and cellular biology.