Initial large-scale exploration of protein-protein interactions in human brain

Study of protein interaction networks is crucial to post-genomic systems biology. Aided by high-throughput screening technologies, biologists are rapidly accumulating protein-protein interaction data. Using a random yeast two-hybrid (R2H) process, we have performed large-scale yeast two-hybrid searches with approximately fifty thousand random human brain cDNA bait fragments against a human brain cDNA prey fragment library. From these searches, we have identified 13,656 unique protein-protein interaction pairs involving 4,473 distinct known human loci. In this paper, we have performed our initial characterization of the protein interaction network in human brain tissue. We have classified and characterized all identified interactions based on gene ontology (GO) annotation of interacting loci. We have also described the "scale-free" topological structure of the network.