Automatic comparison of interactomes

Abstract

Cell are the basic building block for life existence. The cell nucleous houses its own DNA, which is composed by genes. On the other hand, most genes contain the information needed to make functional molecules called proteins, using protein interactions it is possible to create biological networks which can be named interactomes. The knowledge of interactomes are essential for our understanding of cellular functions and the origin of many diseases. However, it is not trivial to compare such networks, since the name of proteins varies from species to species, besides that, networks were mostly established in model species such humans and only 10 \% of protein interaction were predicted. Since there is a lot of common metabolic networks among different species one can use the information of a specific interactome of a well studied species and look for "missing genes" in a, not so well, studied species. The biologist research will then focus on detecting the predicted genes in the less studied species instead of making a "blind search for genes". The main goal of this dissertation is to design, implement and test, a tool, that enables the comparison of interactomes that belongs to same or different species and present these genes interactions.