Towards a reproducible interactome: semantic-based detection of redundancies to unify protein-protein interaction databases

Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) play an ubiquitous and fundamental role in all biological processes. Information on PPIs described in the literature is annotated and made available by several protein-interaction databases. Because most databases have their own curation rules and priorities, they often annotate overlapping sets of publications, which leads to redundancies. We developed a semantic-based approach which enables to accurately detect redundancies within PPI datasets from multiple databases. We applied this approach to assemble a "reproducible interactome", with PPIs supported by at least two methods or publications.