PPISE: gene ontology-based search for protein–protein interactions

This paper presents a new search engine called PPISearchEngine which finds protein–protein interactions (PPIs) using the gene ontology (GO) and the biological relations of proteins. For efficient retrieval of PPIs, each GO term is assigned a prime number and the relation between the terms is represented by the product of prime numbers. This representation is hidden from users but facilitates the search for the interactions of a query protein by unique prime factorisation of the number that represents the query protein. For a query protein, PPISearchEngine considers not only the GO term associated with the query protein but also the GO terms at the lower level than the GO term in the GO hierarchy, and finds all the interactions of the query protein which satisfy the search condition. In contrast, the standard keyword-matching or ID-matching search method cannot find the interactions of a protein unless the interactions involve a protein with explicit annotations. To the best of our knowledge, this search engine is the first method that can process queries like ‘for protein p with GO \[g _{1}\] g1, find p's interaction partners with GO \[g _{2}\] g2’. PPISearchEngine is freely available to academics at http://search.hpid.org/.