Do you react to someone teasing you? You probably do, because in response to a stimulus, we all respond… and so cells do.
Upon a stimulus, which may be a growth factor in the culture medium or in the body, cells respond by triggering some “signaling pathways”. This means that proteins inside a cell interact, make networks, to somehow activate, repress or modify each other’s and convey a signal. Proteins cannot respond to stimuli if they cannot “pass the message” to the neighboring ones.
So, to unveil key processes in cell physiology and pathology, scientists have to consider protein-protein interactions. The web is full of papers describing biologically relevant protein interactions, which have been experimentally explored, in a given tissue, in a given condition. A potentially invaluable source of information.
However, retrieving such information from the huge number of scientific papers and making sense out of it is not easy and to do so scientists have generated databases collecting such information. Unfortunately, often these databases do not include critical info relatively to the interactions they report, such as the context in which this interaction occurs or the direction of the interaction: for instance, i. two proteins may interact in a tissue but not in another, and ii. is protein A modifying protein B upon interaction or vice-versa?
This is critical because if the information is incomplete, how can people formulate solid scientific hypotheses?
HIPPIE is a web tool for scientists that takes into consideration these aspects, thus providing, with a user-friendly interface, a tool to easily find reliable information on protein-protein interactions, because only if they interact, in the end, they can do their job.
Reference : HIPPIE v2.0: Enhancing Meaningfulness and Reliability of Protein-Protein Interaction Networks. Gregorio Alanis-Lobato, Miguel A Andrade-Navarro, Martin H Schaefer. Nucleic Acids Res 2017