Assessment of community efforts to advance network-based prediction of protein-protein interactions.

Comprehensive understanding of the human protein-protein interaction (PPI) network, aka the human interactome, can provide important insights into the molecular mechanisms of complex biological processes and diseases. Despite the remarkable experimental efforts undertaken to date to determine the structure of the human interactome, many PPIs remain unmapped. Computational approaches, especially network-based methods, can facilitate the identification of previously uncharacterized PPIs. Many such methods have been proposed. Yet, a systematic evaluation of existing network-based methods in predicting PPIs is still lacking. Here, we report community efforts initiated by the International Network Medicine Consortium to benchmark the ability of 26 representative network-based methods to predict PPIs across six different interactomes of four different organisms: A. thaliana, C. elegans, S. cerevisiae, and H. sapiens. Through extensive computational and experimental validations, we found that advanced similarity-based methods, which leverage the underlying network characteristics of PPIs, show superior performance over other general link prediction methods in the interactomes we considered.

Reducing the global burden of HTLV-1 infection: An agenda for research and action.

Even though an estimated 10-20 million people worldwide are infected with the oncogenic retrovirus, human T-lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1), its epidemiology is poorly understood, and little effort has been made to reduce its prevalence. In response to this situation, the Global Virus Network launched a taskforce in 2014 to develop new methods of prevention and treatment of HTLV-1 infection and promote basic research. HTLV-1 is the etiological agent of two life-threatening diseases, adult T-cell leukemia and HTLV-associated myelopathy/tropical spastic paraparesis, for which no effective therapy is currently available. Although the modes of transmission of HTLV-1 resemble those of the more familiar HIV-1, routine diagnostic methods are generally unavailable to support the prevention of new infections. In the present article, the Taskforce proposes a series of actions to expand epidemiological studies; increase research on mechanisms of HTLV-1 persistence, replication and pathogenesis; discover effective treatments; and develop prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines.