VirHostNet: a knowledge base for the management and the analysis of proteome-wide virus–host interaction networks

Navratil, Vincent; de Chassey, Benoît; Meyniel, Laurène; Delmotte, Stéphane; Gautier, Christian; André, Patrice; Lotteau, Vincent; Rabourdin-Combe, Chantal

The first draft of the human cellular network, also referred to the human interactome, has been explored at the proteome-wide level by the mean of high-throughput experiments such as yeast-two hybrid screens (11, 12) or tap-tag procedure (13) . The overall quality and completeness of this human cellular network has been significantly improved thanks to systematic approaches based on text-mining and literature-curated interactions extracted from low-throughput experiments. Many generalized and specialized databases are involved in the integration of these protein-protein interactions, such as BIND (14) , MINT (15) , INTACT (16) , HPRD (17) , DIP (18) , BIOGRID (19) , REACTOME (20) , GENERIF (21) and NETWORKIN (22) . However, the low redundancy of interactions found between these databases has raised the need to unify such data resources for human and model organisms (23) . Concerning virus-virus and virus-host protein-protein interactions, few high-throughput experiments have been achieved, except some yeast-two hybrid screens completed for Herpes viruses (EBV, KSH, VZV, HSV-1) (24) (25) (26) and SARS (27) . Although some generalist databases like BIND, MINT, INTACT and HIV-GENERIF provide access to virus-virus and virus-host protein-protein interactions, no systematic approach has been reported to exhaustively mine and curate all interactions that have accumulated in scientific publications.