Overrepresentation of interactions between homologous proteins in interactomes

Abstract

It is well proved that the probability that a protein interacts with itself is higher than that it interacts with another protein. It has been recently shown that the probability of interaction is also higher for proteins with significant sequence similarity. In this paper we show that proteins sharing identical PFAM domains interact more often than expected by chance in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Escherichia coli. We also analyze the variety of domain interfaces used by homologous proteins to interact and show that the overrepresentation of interactions between homological proteins is not caused by small number of pairs of identical "sticky domains" shared between interacting proteins.