Comparative interactomics: comparing apples and pears?

The study of the complex web of interactions that link biological molecules in a cell is the subject of interactomics – currently one of the fastest moving fields in molecular biology. The recent completion of high-throughput studies to investigate systematically all the possible interactions in a variety of model organisms has provided unique opportunities to compare interaction networks and ask questions about their conservation during evolution. It is expected that this approach will yield a scientific return as rich as that obtained in the past decade from comparing genomes and proteomes from different organisms.