title: Estimating the size of the human interactome.
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 approximately 650,000. We find that the human interaction network is one order of magnitude bigger than the Drosophila melanogaster interactome and approximately 3 times bigger than in Caenorhabditis elegans.
authors.affiliation: Division of Molecular Biosciences, Imperial College London, Wolfson Building, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom. m.stumpf@imperial.ac.uk
authors.forename: Michael P H
authors.initials: MP
authors.lastname: Stumpf
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Thorne
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: de Silva
authors.forename: Ronald
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Stewart
authors.forename: Hyeong Jun
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: An
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lappe
authors.forename: Carsten
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Wiuf
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D017173:Caenorhabditis elegans / Q000378:metabolism; D030562:Databases, Protein; D004331:Drosophila melanogaster / Q000378:metabolism; D006801:Humans; D025941:Protein Interaction Mapping; D012441:Saccharomyces cerevisiae / Q000378:metabolism