Replies

• Matthew Child

  23 November 2007 | 08:27

  The simplest answer is yes. Many many people. However, in terms of available sources of protein interaction data I can only really suggest the normal paper trail. Plasmodium proteins are notoriously difficult to work with, the reasons for which aren’t entirely understood. Thus, work to date has been limited to individual labs looking at their protein of interest and trying to use interaction data to place the protein in some functional framework. Most of the surface expressed adhesin papers speculate to potential interacting papers and the best characterised is probably the MSP1/MSP6/MSP7 complex. Additionally, the PfEMP1 protein interacts with numerous partners during its trafficking and eventual localisation at the surface of infected erythrocytes. Recent work has looked at interactins between parasite and host proteins e.g. PfEMP3 with Spectrin, and PfCS with hepatocyte nuclear importins. Pubmed screen that lot and it should give you something to look at for starters. As I said, we’re all trying to put our proteins into some form of functional framework and so I’d be genuinely surprised by any group not working on protein interactions.

  I hope this has been of use,

  Regards,

  Matthew

• THOMAS JOSEPH

  26 November 2007 | 04:34

  Thanks for the reply. Yes, apart from a paper by LaCount et al, very little is available. I wonder why? Would the use of Natural Language Processing on literature help?