Interactive proteomics: what lies ahead?

Interactive proteomics addresses the physical associations among proteins and establishes global, disease-, and pathway-specific protein interaction networks. The inherent chemical and structural diversity of proteins, their different expression levels, and their distinct subcellular localizations pose unique challenges for the exploration of these networks, necessitating the use of a variety of innovative and ingenious approaches. Consequently, recent years have seen exciting developments in protein interaction mapping and the establishment of very large interaction networks, especially in model organisms. In the near future, attention will shift to the establishment of interaction networks in humans and their application in drug discovery and understanding of diseases. In this review, we present an impressive toolbox of different technologies that we expect to be crucial for interactive proteomics in the coming years.