<p>This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.</p> <p>In recent years, the biomolecular sciences have been driven forward by overwhelming
advances in new biotechnological high-throughput experimental methods and bioinformatic
genome-wide computational methods. Such breakthroughs are producing
huge amounts of new data that need to be carefully analysed to obtain correct and
useful scientific knowledge. One of the fields where this advance has become more
intense is the study of the network of ‘protein–protein interactions’, i.e. the ‘interactome’.
In this short review we comment on the main data and databases produced
in this field in last 5 years. We also present a rationalized scheme of biological definitions
that will be useful for a better understanding and interpretation of ‘what a
protein–protein interaction is’ and ‘which types of protein–protein interactions are
found in a living cell’. Finally, we comment on some assignments of interactome data
to defined types of protein interaction and we present a new bioinformatic tool called
APIN (Agile Protein Interaction Network browser), which is in development and will
be applied to browsing protein interaction databases.</p>
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Comp Funct Genomics. 2004 Mar; 5(2):173-178