Terms / Interactome

Interactome

Interactome is defined as the whole set of molecular interactions in cells. It is usually displayed as a directed graph. Molecular interactions can occur between molecules belonging to different biochemical families (proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, carbohydrates, ....) and also within a given family. When spoken in terms of proteomics, interactome refers to protein-protein interaction network(PPI), or protein interaction network (PIN). Another extensively studied type of interactome is the protein-DNA interactome (network formed by transcription factors (and DNA or chromatin regulatory proteins) and their target genes. The word "interactome" was originally coined in 1999 by a group of french scientists headed by Bernard Jacq (see Nucleic acids research 27(1):89-94; PubMed ID: 9847149).

It has been suggested that the size of an organism's interactome correlates better than genome size with the biological complexity of the organism (Stumpf, et al., 2008). Although protein-protein interaction maps containing several thousands of binary interactions are now available for several organisms, none of them is presently complete and the size of interactomes is still a matter of debate.

refer to : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactome