Interolog
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An Interolog is a recently introduced term used in the fields of System Biology and Bioinformatics.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
