Interolog

An Interolog is a recently introduced term used in the fields of System Biology and Bioinformatics.

Definition

Consider two different human protein molecules A and B that interact, i.e. bind to each other. If you would look for homologous proteins to A and B (homologs = proteins that are similar in their aminoacid sequence) in another organism (e.g. a dog), we might find the dog proteins A' and B', where A' is homologous (similar in sequence) to A and B' is homologous to B.Now, we would call the pair A' and B' an interolog of A and B if (and only if!) A' and B' also bind to each other.

Thus, interologs could be described as a resembling pair of protein-protein interactions (e.g. A-B and A'-B'), which can be observed parallelly in two different organisms.

External links

* [http://interolog.com Interolog.com] : Interolog portal site.
* [http://interactome.org Interactome.org] : Interactome portal site.
* [http://interactomics.org Interactomics.org] : Interactomics portal site.

References

1) Yu H, Luscombe NM, Lu HX, Zhu X, Xia Y, Han JD, Bertin N, Chung S, Vidal M, Gerstein M."Annotation transfer between genomes: protein-protein interologs and protein-DNA regulogs".Genome Research 2004 Jun;14(6):1107-18.

2) "Ulysses - an application for the projection of molecular interactions across species".Kemmer D, Huang Y, Shah SP, Lim J, Brumm J, Yuen MM, Ling J, Xu T, Wasserman WW, Ouellette BF.Genome Biology 2005;6(12):R106. Epub 2005 Dec 2.