Research article
Interactome and Gene Ontology provide congruent yet subtly different views of a eukaryotic cell
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* Corresponding author: Ignacio Marín imarin@ibv.csic.es
1 Center for Evolutionary Functional Genomics, The Biodesign Institute, Tempe, Arizona State University, USA
2 Instituto de Biomedicina de Valencia, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (IBV-CSIC), Valencia, Spain
BMC Systems Biology 2009, 3:69 doi:10.1186/1752-0509-3-69
Published: 15 July 2009Abstract
Background
The characterization of the global functional structure of a cell is a major goal in bioinformatics and systems biology. Gene Ontology (GO) and the protein-protein interaction network offer alternative views of that structure.
Results
This study presents a comparison of the global structures of the Gene Ontology and the interactome of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Sensitive, unsupervised methods of clustering applied to a large fraction of the proteome led to establish a GO-interactome correlation value of +0.47 for a general dataset that contains both high and low-confidence interactions and +0.58 for a smaller, high-confidence dataset.
Conclusion
The structures of the yeast cell deduced from GO and interactome are substantially congruent. However, some significant differences were also detected, which may contribute to a better understanding of cell function and also to a refinement of the current ontologies.