The scientists Roberto Mosca, Arnaud Ceol and Patrick Aloy provide the international biomedical community with Interactome 3D, an open-access and free web platform developed entirely by the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), based in the Barcelona Science Park. Interactome 3D offers for the first time the possibility to anonymously access and add molecular details of protein interactions and to obtain the information in 3D models. For researchers, atomic level details about the reactions are fundamental to unravel the bases of biology, disease development, and the design of experiments and drugs to combat diseases.

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Interactome 3D provides reliable information about more than 12,000 protein interactions for eight model organisms, namely the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, the fly Drosophila melanogaster, the bacteria Escherichia coli and Helicobacter pylori, the brewer’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the mouse Mus musculus, and Homo sapiens. These models are considered the most relevant in biomedical research and genetic studies. The journal Nature Methods presents the research results and accredits the platform on the basis of it high reliability and precision in modelling interactions, which reaches an average of 75%.

Patrick Aloy, ICREA researcher at IRB Barcelona, head of the Structural Bioinformatics and Network Biology Lab, and researcher with the joint IRB Barcelona-BSC programme, explains “we have designed Interactome3D for molecular and cellular biologists. It is a well organized non–technical interface that presents the results in a simple manner. With only a few clicks of the mouse, you can get the information you are looking for and you don’t have to be a bioinformatician to navigate around the platform, to look things up or to interpret the results”.

The post-doctoral fellow Roberto Mosca explains that platform has come about after more than four years of lab experience: “we undertake collaborations with groups around the world that need these data; data that we can now provide automatically”. The data included in Interactome3D is updated every six months and the researchers expect to be able to simulate up the 16,000 interaction in the near future. “The tool is continuously growing. We will introduce more information and thus increase the number of interactions covered while maintaining reliability as a key feature”, remarks Mosca.

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