An interaction network of RNA-binding proteins involved in Drosophila oogenesis

Prashali Bansal; Johannes Madlung; Kristina Schaaf; Boris Macek; Fulvia Bono

To understand how the proteomes identified with each bait interact with each other, we built a composite network of all statistically significant interactants. While each bait has its distinct proteome, the network is also connected, in agreement with the spatial and temporal distribution of the transcripts they regulate. In particular, we observed a considerable overlap between functionally related proteins such as Hrp48 and Glo (Fig. S4 ). To gain a systemic understanding of the network, we also added the known protein-protein associations from the String v. 11.0 (77) and FlyBase (78) databases. Next, we carried out a modularity analysis to identify highly connected communities of proteins (Fig. 4a ). As expected, many proteins involved in oogenesis, mRNA localization, translational regulation and germ cell formation were selectively enriched with all the baits. Additionally, proteins involved in neurogenesis and splicing were also overrepresented, consistent with the well-studied function of selected RBPs in these processes (Fig. 4b) .