A one-stop-shop for biomolecular interaction data

The molecules in our cells are continuously interacting: turning each other on or off, working together, splitting up and networking. Understanding the countless ways in which they interact is a major challenge in biology. Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and colleagues in the International Molecular Exchange (IMEx) consortium are rising to the challenge by offering researchers a freely available set of experimental interaction data that can be queried from a single interface. To make it easier to create a picture of an organism’s ‘interactome’ -– the interactions between all of its molecules -– IMEx partners have been working since 2004 to create a one-stop-shop for interaction data. “We’ve now made it easier to find information about proteins that interact with a given molecule, and to compare new experimental results with publicly available, curated experimental data,” says Gianni Cesareni of the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’ in Italy.