Background: Our knowledge of global protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks in complex organisms such as humans is hindered by technical limitations of current methods.
Results: On the basis of short co-occurring polypeptide regions, we developed a tool called MP-PIPE capable of predicting a global human PPI network within 3 months. With a recall of 23% at a precision of 82.1%, we predicted 172,132 putative PPIs. We demonstrate the usefulness of these predictions through a range of experiments.
Conclusions: The speed and accuracy associated with MP-PIPE can make this a potential tool to study individual human PPI networks (from genomic sequences alone) for personalized medicine.