Proteome-scale binary interactomics in human cells

(Image borrowed from: http://www.crl-mappit.be/contact/)

Ummm...in the clear winner of "Wow..Ben's knowledge of molecular assays is super crazy out of date and here is proof" contest, (maybe its time for me to read a book or go back to school!) I'd like to present the following paper currently in press at MCP.

Deep breath. Okay. So I couldn't even get through the second paragraph of the introduction before I had to start searching references. If you are interested in the most complex version of a Yeast 2-hybrid protein-protein interaction assay that anyone ever dreamed up, I suggest you check out: http://www.crl-mappit.be/mappit_toolbox/mappit_concept/ where I stole the first image of this post.

This methodology utilizes the well-characterized (but completely understood??)  JAK/STAT pathway to verify protein-protein interaction. And in the paper above, they used this, as well as a variation of this technique (called MASPIT) to interrogate a large portion of the interactome of Hek293T cancer cells.

Full disclosure: I'm pretty sure that even after having this open on my desktop for 2 days and looking at it...several...times, I still don't get it.

Fortunately! for my fragile sense of self worth I do understand how another Interactome project works cause it is like this:

This, of course, is the Harvard BioPlex Project that was described in this Cell Paper last year, is still going strong, and have even more data than it did when the paper came out. This, in my limited understanding, is the ultimate resource for what protein interacts with what.

Of course -- my first question when checking out this massively complex method for semi-globally checking out the interactome -- how do the results compare to the 50k protein-protein interactions predicted by BioPlex?!?!

And...they don't say. Heck, they don't even reference the paper!  Maybe they submitted it before BioPlex dropped this awesome resource on us. If you compare the results from these two techniques, definitely shoot me an email. I'm super curious now!