the international molecular exchange (imex) consortium is an international collaboration between major public interaction data providers to share literature-curation efforts and make a nonredundant set of protein interactions available in a single search interface on a common website (http://www.imexconsortium.org/). common curation rules have been developed, and a central registry is used to manage the selection of articles to enter into the dataset. We discuss the advantages of such a service to the user, our quality-control measures and our data-distribution practices. Protein-protein interactions are a key element in our understanding of molecular biology. However, in contrast to areas of activity such as DNA sequencing or protein structural analysis, the systematic capture of published molecular interaction data into public domain repositories is still in its infancy. This is not due to lack of resources in this domain. As of December 2011, the PathGuide resource 1 listed more than 100 protein-protein interaction-related databases. Although many of these databases focus on predictions of potential interactions or on mapping interologs, rather than experimentally determined interactions, the extent of activity suggests ample resources. However, most of these resources are independently funded and pursue their goals in isolation. As a result, accessing all publicly available molecular interaction data, even on a specific biological or biomedical topic, is a challenging, time-consuming task that requires the user to query multiple resources, each with a different interface; additionally, many resources use different identifiers and often contain redundant data from overlapping sets of publications. Efforts to address this problem began ten years ago with the development of a common file format for representing protein-interaction data. The 'minimum information about a molecular interaction experiment' (MIMIX) guidelines had been published then 2 , defining a list of the information to be supplied when
Orchard et al. proposed the International Molecular Exchange (IMEx), which allows the participant protein databases to pool their literature curation efforts REF .
Protein interaction data curation: the International Molecular Exchange (IMEx) consortium
Nature Methods
Nature Methods
Medicine Biology