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Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are frequently mediated by the binding of a modular domain in one protein to a short, linear peptide motif in its partner. The advent of proteomic methods such as peptide and protein arrays has led to the accumulation of a wealth of interaction data for modular interaction domains. Although several computational programs have been developed to predict modular domain-mediated PPI events, they are often restricted to a given domain type. We describe DomPep, a method that can potentially be used to predict PPIs mediated by any modular domains. DomPep combines proteomic data with sequence information to achieve high accuracy and high coverage in PPI prediction. Proteomic binding data were employed to determine a simple yet novel parameter Ligand-Binding Similarity which, in turn, is used to calibrate Domain Sequence Identity and Position-Weighted-Matrix distance, two parameters that are used in constructing prediction models. Moreover, DomPep can be used to predict PPIs for both domains with experimental binding data and those without. Using the PDZ and SH2 domain families as test cases, we show that DomPep can predict PPIs with accuracies superior to existing methods. To evaluate DomPep as a discovery tool, we deployed DomPep to identify interactions mediated by three human PDZ domains. Subsequent in-solution binding assays validated the high accuracy of DomPep in predicting authentic PPIs at the proteome scale. Because DomPep makes use of only interaction data and the primary sequence of a domain, it can be readily expanded to include other types of modular domains.

We present a new preprocessing method, PeakSelect, to improve the accuracy and efficiency of Tandem Mass-Spec peptide (protein) identification. The fundamental difference between noise and fragment ions in spectra is that ions have isotopes but noise does not. We propose a new and important concept of an Isotope Pattern Vector (IPV) which characterizes the isotope cluster of fragment ions. Then the noise and real peaks can be distinguished by the quantitative IPV values. PeakSelect first uses a new method of the Gaussian Mixture Model and Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to find the base intensity level (baseline) in a spectrum. Then PeakSelect selects features based on the IPV and baseline, and constructs a decision tree to automatically classify the peaks into different categories such as noise, single ion peaks, and overlapping peaks. Experiments show that PeakSelect can help to reduce the Mascot searching time and increase the reliability of peptide identifications. In particular, PeakSelect performs well on complex spectra with a large number of peaks from large peptides, and supports more sequence identification than other well-known systems.