The Human Interactome Falls into place

Two years after the completion of the human genome, the human "interactome" is coming together – a first draft, so to speak, of protein-protein interactions, the subject of the story on the pages that follow. The interactome efforts came from humble beginnings, based on work on much smaller organisms, C. elegans and Drosophila, as described onpage18. And just as the results of genomics efforts on those organisms were hotly debated, says systems biology researcher Marc Vidal, some researchers are strongly opposed to the human interactome. No matter how they feel about the project, however, researchers want to see their proteins in the maps that Vidal and his colleagues are working to complete. Onpage 20, Herbert M. Sauro looks into the future and demonstrates just how inadequate such data accumulation tasks can be when trying to piece together the whole picture through systems biology models.

Two years ago the Human Genome ...