Estimating the size of the human interactome

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

  • Michael P.H. Stumpf
  • Thomas Thorne
  • Eric De Silva
  • Ronald Stewart
  • Jun An Hyeong
  • Michael Lappe
  • Wiuf, Carsten

After the completion of the human and other genome projects it emerged that the number of genes in organisms as diverse as fruit flies, nematodes, and humans does not reflect our perception of their relative complexity. Here, we provide reliable evidence that the size of protein interaction networks in different organisms appears to correlate much better with their apparent biological complexity. We develop a stable and powerful, yet simple, statistical procedure to estimate the size of the whole network from subnet data. This approach is then applied to a range of eukaryotic organisms for which extensive protein interaction data have been collected and we estimate the number of interactions in humans to be ≈650,000. We find that the human interaction network is one order of magnitude bigger than the Drosophila melanogaster interactome and ≈3 times bigger than in Caenorhabditis elegans.

Original languageEnglish
JournalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Volume105
Issue number19
Pages (from-to)6959-6964
Number of pages6
ISSN0027-8424
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 13 May 2008

    Research areas

  • Evolutionary systems biology, Network evolution, Network inference, Network sampling theory

ID: 229280304