Using Drosophila melanogaster Data to Discover Disease-Related Protein Interactions in Humans

The discovery and understanding of functional relationships amongst genes and their gene products are fundamental to our understanding of human disease. Data regarding protein-protein interactions in humans are not complete and computational techniques along with data provided from other organisms can be used to better inform relationships in humans. We demonstrate the utility of using genome scale data from Drosophila melanogaster to predict protein-protein relationships for human proteins specific to disease. To find the most likely candidates for protein-protein interaction, the predicted relationships are tested against human protein interaction and known disease data, then ranked through a support vector machine. An illustrative example related to hBrm and hSNF5 shows the validity of our approach