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World J Virol. Nov 25, 2021; 10(6): 288-300
Published online Nov 25, 2021. doi: 10.5501/wjv.v10.i6.288
Protein-protein interactions: Methods, databases, and applications in virus-host study
Qurat ul Ain Farooq, Zeeshan Shaukat, Sara Aiman, Chun-Hua Li
Qurat ul Ain Farooq, Sara Aiman, Chun-Hua Li, Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124, China
Zeeshan Shaukat, Faculty of Information Technology, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124, China
Author contributions: Farooq QUA and Li CH conceived of the review; Farooq QUA, Shaukat Z, and Aiman S reviewed the related literature; Farooq QUA drafted the original manuscript; Li CH read, revised, and approved the final manuscript; all the authors have read and approved the final manuscript.
Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China, No. 31971180 and No. 11474013.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest to disclose.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Chun-Hua Li, PhD, Professor, Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences, Beijing University of Technology, No. 100 Pingleyuan, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100124, China. chunhuali@bjut.edu.cn
Received: March 15, 2021
Peer-review started: March 15, 2021
First decision: April 6, 2021
Revised: April 19, 2021
Accepted: July 30, 2021
Article in press: July 30, 2021
Published online: November 25, 2021
Processing time: 252 Days and 0.4 Hours
Core Tip

Core Tip: This paper provides a comprehensive review on protein-protein interactions (PPIs), including the experimental and computational methods of finding PPIs, the databases dedicated to virus-host PPIs, and the associated applications in the studies of some lethal viruses with their hosts. PPIs can be mapped into networks and innumerable novel insights into the functional organization of proteomes can be gained by analyzing the networks. Many studies have used network biology to construct PPI networks of lethal pathogens with their host Homo sapiens to dig deep down into the molecular constitution of the disease pathways, and have successfully found multiple potential drug targets against the viruses.