Skip to main content
Log in

A survey of current trends in computational predictions of protein-protein interactions

  • Review Article
  • Published:
Frontiers of Computer Science Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Proteomics become an important research area of interests in life science after the completion of the human genome project. This scientific is to study the characteristics of proteins at the large-scale data level, and then gain a holistic and comprehensive understanding of the process of disease occurrence and cell metabolism at the protein level. A key issue in proteomics is how to efficiently analyze the massive amounts of protein data produced by high-throughput technologies. Computational technologies with low-cost and short-cycle are becoming the preferred methods for solving some important problems in post-genome era, such as protein-protein interactions (PPIs). In this review, we focus on computational methods for PPIs detection and show recent advancements in this critical area from multiple aspects. First, we analyze in detail the several challenges for computational methods for predicting PPIs and summarize the available PPIs data sources. Second, we describe the state-of-the-art computational methods recently proposed on this topic. Finally, we discuss some important technologies that can promote the prediction of PPI and the development of computational proteomics.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Colinge J, Bennett K L. Introduction to computational proteomics. PLoS Computational Biology, 2007, 3(7): e114

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Matthiesen R. Methods, algorithms and tools in computational proteomics: a practical point of view. Proteomics, 2010, 7(16): 2815–2832

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Jones S, Thornton J M. Principles of protein-protein interactions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 1996, 93(1): 13–20

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Phizicky E M, Fields S. Protein-protein interactions: methods for detection and analysis. Microbiological Reviews, 1995, 59(1): 94–123

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Jansen R, Yu H, Greenbaum D, Kluger Y, Krogan N J, Chung S, Emili A, Snyder M, Greenblatt J F, Gerstein M. A Bayesian networks approach for predicting protein-protein interactions from genomic data. Science, 2003, 302(5644): 449–453

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Rhodes D R, Tomlins S A, Varambally S, Mahavisno V, Barrette T, Kalyanasundaram S, Ghosh D, Pandey A, Chinnaiyan A M. Probabilistic model of the human protein-protein interaction network. Nature Biotechnology, 2005, 23(8): 951–959

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Oti M, Snel B, Huynen M A, Brunner H G. Predicting disease genes using protein-protein interactions. Journal of Medical Genetics, 2006, 43(8): 691–698

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Sprinzak E, Sattath S, Margalit H. How reliable are experimental protein-protein interaction data? Journal of Molecular Biology, 2003, 327(5): 919–923

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Letovsky S, Kasif S. Predicting protein function from protein-protein interaction data: a probabilistic approach. Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology, 2003, 19: 197–204

    Google Scholar 

  10. Xenarios I, Salwinski L, Duan X J, Higney P, Kim S, Eisenberg D. DIP, the database of interacting proteins: a research tool for studying cellular networks of protein interactions. Nucleic Acids Research, 2002, 30(1): 303–305

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Chatr-Aryamontri A, Breitkreutz B J, Heinicke S, Boucher L, Winter A, Stark C, Nixon J, Ramage L, Kolas N, Odonnell L. The BioGRID interaction database. Nucleic Acids Research, 2013, 41: D816–D823

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Bader G D, Betel D, Hogue C W V. BIND: the biomolecular interaction network database. Nucleic Acids Research, 2001, 31(1): 248–250

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Cherry J M, Adler C, Ball C A, Chervitz S A, Dwight S S, Hester E T, Jia Y, Juvik G, Roe T, Schroeder M. SGD: saccharomyces genome database. Nucleic Acids Research, 1998, 26(1): 73–79

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Peri S, Navarro J D, Amanchy R, Kristiansen T Z, Jonnalagadda C K, Surendranath V, Niranjan V, Muthusamy B, Gandhi T K, Gronborg M. Development of human protein reference database as an initial platform for approaching systems biology in humans. Genome Research, 2003, 13(10): 2363–2371

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Pagel P, Kovac S, Oesterheld M, Brauner B, Dungerkaltenbach I, Frishman G, Montrone C, Mark P, Stumpflen V, Mewes H. The MIPS mammalian protein-protein interaction database. Bioinformatics, 2005, 21(6): 832–834

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Samuel K, Bruno A, Lionel B, Alan B, Fiona B C, Carol C, Margaret D, Marine D, Marc F, Ursula H. The IntAct molecular interaction database in 2012. Nucleic Acids Research, 2012, 40(Database issue): 841–846

    Google Scholar 

  17. Wei L, Xing P, Zeng J, Chen J, Su R, Guo F. Improved prediction of protein-protein interactions using novel negative samples, features, and an ensemble classifier. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 2017, 83: 67–74

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Ding Y, Tang J, Guo F. Predicting protein-protein interactions via multivariate mutual information of protein sequences. BMC Bioinformatics, 2016, 17(1): 398

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Wang T, Li L, Huang Y, Zhang H, Ma Y, Zhou X. Prediction of proteinprotein interactions from amino acid sequences based on continuous and discrete wavelet transform features. Molecules, 2018, 23(4): 823

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Wang Y, You Z, Li L, Huang Y, Yi H. Detection of interactions between proteins by using legendre moments descriptor to extract discriminatory information embedded in PSSM. Molecules, 2017, 22(8): 1366

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Shen J, Zhang J, Luo X, Zhu W, Yu K, Chen K, Li Y, Jiang H. Predicting protein-protein interactions based only on sequences information. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2007, 104(11): 4337–4341

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Guo Y, Yu L, Wen Z, Li M. Using support vector machine combined with auto covariance to predict protein-protein interactions from protein sequences. Nucleic Acids Research, 2008, 36(9): 3025–3030

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Cosic I, Hearn M T. Studies on protein-DNA interactions using the resonant recognition model: application to repressors and transforming proteins. FEBS Journal, 2010, 205(2): 613–619

    Google Scholar 

  24. Yang L, Xia J F, Gui J. Prediction of protein-protein interactions from protein sequence using local descriptors. Protein & Peptide Letters, 2010, 17(9): 1085–1090

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Hu L, Chan K C C. Extracting coevolutionary features from protein sequences for predicting protein-protein interactions. IEEE/ACM Transactions Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, 2017, 14(1): 155–166

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Wei Z S, Yang J Y, Yu D J. Predicting protein-protein interactions with weighted PSSM histogram and random forests. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Intelligent Science and Big Data Engineering. 2015, 326–335

  27. Zahiri J, Yaghoubi O, Mohammad-Noori M, Ebrahimpour R, Masoudi-Nejad A. PPIevo: protein-protein interaction prediction from PSSM based evolutionary information. Genomics, 2013, 102(4): 237–242

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Lin C Y, Chen Y C, Lo Y S, Yang J M. Inferring homologous proteinprotein interactions through pair position specific scoring matrix. BMC Bioinformatics, 2013, 14(S2): S11

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Wang Y, You Z, Li X, Chen X, Jiang T, Zhang J. PCVMZM: using the probabilistic classification vector machines model combined with a zernike moments descriptor to predict protein-protein interactions from protein sequences. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2017, 18(5): 1029

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Li L P, Wang Y B, You Z H, Li Y, An J Y. PCLPred: a bioinformatics method for predicting protein-protein interactions by combining relevance vector machine model with low-rank matrix approximation. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2018, 19(4): 1029

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Song X Y, Chen Z H, Sun X Y, You Z H, Li L P, Zhao Y. An ensemble classifier with random projection for predicting protein-protein interactions using sequence and evolutionary information. Applied Sciences, 2018, 8(1): 89

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. An J Y, Meng F R, You Z H, Fang Y H, Zhao Y J, Zhang M. Using the relevance vector machine model combined with local phase quantization to predict protein-protein interactions from protein sequences. BioMed Research International, 2016, 2016: 1–9

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Cheung W, Hamarneh G. n-SIFT: n-dimensional scale invariant feature transform. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2009, 18(9): 2012

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  34. Bay H, Ess A, Tuytelaars T, Van Gool L. Speeded-up robust features. Computer Vision & Image Understanding, 2008, 110(3): 404–417

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Žunić J, Hirota K, Rosin P L. A Hu moment invariant as a shape circularity measure. Pattern Recognition, 2010, 43(1): 47–57

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  36. Khotanzad A, Hong Y H. Invariant image recognition by Zernike moments. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis & Machine Intelligence, 1990, 12(5): 489–497

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Zhang F, Liu S Q, Wang D B, Guan W. Aircraft recognition in infrared image using wavelet moment invariants. Image & Vision Computing, 2009, 27(4): 313–318

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Dalal N, Triggs B. Histograms of oriented gradients for human detection. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2005, 886–893

  39. Whitehill J, Omlin C W. Haar features for FACS AU recognition. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition. 2006, 97–101

  40. Ojala T, Pietikainen M, Harwood D. Performance evaluation of texture measures with classification based on Kullback discrimination of distributions. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Pattern Recognition. 1994, 582–585

  41. He D C, Wang L. Texture features based on texture spectrum. Pattern Recognition, 1991, 24(5): 391–399

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  42. Qian S, Chen D. Discrete gabor transform. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 1993, 41(7): 2429–2438

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  43. Zeng J, Li D, Wu Y, Zou Q, Liu X. An empirical study of features fusion techniques for protein-protein interaction prediction. Current Bioinformatics, 2016, 11(1): 4–12

    Article  Google Scholar 

  44. Tipping M E. Sparse Bayesian learning and the relevance vector machine. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2001, 1(3): 211–244

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  45. Tipping M E. The relevance vector machine. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. 2000, 652–658

  46. Wei L, Yang Y, Nishikawa R M, Wernick M N, Edwards A. Relevance vector machine for automatic detection of clustered microcalcifications. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2005, 24(10): 1278

    Article  Google Scholar 

  47. Zhou Z. Learnware: on the future of machine learning. Frontiers of Computer Science, 2016, 10(4): 589–590

    Article  Google Scholar 

  48. Rong W, Peng B, Ouyang Y, Li C, Xiong Z. Structural information aware deep semi-supervised recurrent neural network for sentiment analysis. Frontiers of Computer Science, 2015, 9(2): 171–184

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  49. Mikolov T, Karafiat M, Burget L, Cernocký J, Khudanpur S. Recurrent neural network based language model. In: Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association. 2010, 1045–1048

  50. Gregor K, Danihelka I, Graves A, Rezende D J, Wierstra D. DRAW: a recurrent neural network for image generation. In: Proceedings of International Conference of Machine Learning. 2015, 1462–1471

  51. Sainath T N, Vinyals O, Senior A, Sak H. Convolutional, long short-term memory, fully connected deep neural networks. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. 2015, 4580–4584

  52. Dyer C, Ballesteros M, Ling W, Matthews A, Smith N A. Transition-based dependency parsing with stack long short-term memory. Computer Science, 2015, 37(2): 321–332

    Google Scholar 

  53. Sak H, Senior A, Beaufays F. Long short-term memory based recurrent neural network architectures for large vocabulary speech recognition. In: Proceedings of the 15 Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association. 2014

  54. Li Z, Wang Y, Zhi T, Chen T. A survey of neural network accelerators. Frontiers of Computer Science, 2017, 11(5): 746–761

    Article  Google Scholar 

  55. Lazib L, Qin B, Zhao Y, Zhang W, Liu T. A syntactic path-based hybrid neural network for negation scope detection. Frontiers of Computer Science, 2020, 14(1): 84–94

    Article  Google Scholar 

  56. Sprinzak E, Margalit H. Correlated sequence-signatures as markers of protein-protein interaction. Journal of Molecular Biology, 2001, 311(4): 681–692

    Article  Google Scholar 

  57. Bock J R, Gough D A. Predicting protein-protein interactions from primary structure. Bioinformatics, 2001, 17(5): 455–460

    Article  Google Scholar 

  58. Martin S, Roe D, Faulon J L. Predicting protein-protein interactions using signature products. Bioinformatics, 2004, 21(2): 218–226

    Article  Google Scholar 

  59. Benhur A, Noble W S. Kernel methods for predicting protein-protein interactions. Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology, 2005, 21(1): 38–46

    Google Scholar 

  60. Chou K, Cai Y. Predicting protein-protein interactions from sequences in a hybridization space. Journal of Proteome Research, 2006, 5(2): 316–322

    Article  Google Scholar 

  61. Wang Y, You Z, Li L, Cheng L, Zhou X, Zhang L, Li X, Jiang T. Predicting protein interactions using a deep learning method-stacked sparse autoencoder combined with a probabilistic classification vector machine. Complexity, 2018, 2018: 1–12

    Google Scholar 

  62. Sun T, Zhou B, Lai L, Pei J. Sequence-based prediction of protein protein interaction using a deep-learning algorithm. BMC Bioinformatics, 2017, 18(1): 277

    Article  Google Scholar 

  63. Almagro Armenteros J J, Sønderby C K, Sønderby S K, Nielsen H, Winther O. DeepLoc: prediction of protein subcellular localization using deep learning. Bioinformatics, 2017, 33(21): 3387–3395

    Article  Google Scholar 

  64. Yi H C, You Z H, Huang D S, Li X, Jiang T H, Li L P. A deep learning framework for robust and accurate prediction of ncRNA-protein interactions using evolutionary information. Molecular Therapy Nucleic Acids, 2018, 11: 337–344

    Article  Google Scholar 

  65. Wang Y B, You Z H, Li X, Jiang T H, Chen X, Zhou X, Wang L. Predicting protein-protein interactions from protein sequences by a stacked sparse autoencoder deep neural network. Molecular Biosystems, 2017, 13(7): 1336–1344

    Article  Google Scholar 

  66. Sennrich R, Haddow B, Birch A. Neural machine translation of rare words with subword units. In: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 2016, 1715–1725

  67. Kudo T. Subword regularization: improving neural network translation models with multiple subword candidates. In: Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 2018, 66–75

  68. Kudo T, Richardson J. SentencePiece: a simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing. In: Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations. 2018, 66–71

  69. Rebentrost P, Mohseni M, Lloyd S. Quantum support vector machine for big data classification. Physical Review Letters, 2013, 113(13): 130503

    Article  Google Scholar 

  70. Crawford D, Levit A, Ghadermarzy N, Oberoi J S, Ronagh P. Reinforcement learning using quantum boltzmann machines. 2016, arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.05695

  71. Qiu D, Li L. An overview of quantum computation models: quantum automata. Frontiers of Computer Science, 2008, 2(2): 193–207

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by Awardee of the NSFC Excellent Young Scholars Program in 2017, in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61902342, 61722212 and 61572506). The authors would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive advices.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zhuhong You.

Additional information

Yanbin Wang received his BE degree in Computer Science and Technology from Zhengzhou University, China in 2015. He obtained his MS degree in Computer Science from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), China in 2018. He is currently a research assistant with the Xinjiang Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. His current research interests include deep neural networks, big data, signal processing, and its applications in bioinformatics.

Zhuhong You received his BE degree in Electronic Information Science and Engineering from Hunan Normal University, China in 2005. He obtained his PhD degree in control science and engineering from University of Science & Technology of China (USTC), China in 2010. From June 2008 to November 2009, he was a visiting research fellow at the Center of Biotechnology and Information, Cornell University, USA. He is currently a professor with the Xinjiang Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. His current research interests include neural networks, big data, intelligent information processing, sparse representation, and their applications in bioinformatics.

Liping Li received his BE degree in architectural engineering from Gansu Agricultural University, China in 2006. She received his Master degree in School of Computer Science from Shenzhen University, China in 2016. She is currently an association professor with the Xijing University, China. Her current research interests include data mining algorithms, neural networks, pattern recognition, and its applications in bioinformatics.

Zhanheng Chen is currently pursuing the PhD degree with the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. His current research interests include data mining, natural language processing, and pattern identification. He has several publications in journals (Published in Molecular Therapy-Nucleic Acids, BMC Genomics, BMC Systems Biology, Frontiers in Genetics, International Journal of Molecular Sciences, and so on), and international conferences (such as RECOMB, ISBRA, ICIC, ICIBM, and so on).

Electronic supplementary material

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Wang, Y., You, Z., Li, L. et al. A survey of current trends in computational predictions of protein-protein interactions. Front. Comput. Sci. 14, 144901 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-019-8232-z

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-019-8232-z

Keywords

Navigation