Evidence

Maintaining high standards of evidence for direct protein interactions helps prevent deterioration of the data content.  For this reason, we performed manual curation of primary reference articles to extensively annotate evidence used for all interactions within the PIN module. 

The current PIN dataset contains >400 pieces of evidence, including (but not limited to) such techniques as yeast two-hybrid, immunoprecipitation, electrophoretic mobility shift assay, FRET, and X-ray crystallography.  Each piece of evidence is documented with the type of tissue/cell used (i.e., rat brain, HeLa cells, etc.)

In the future, our researchers plan to group this evidence into 8-10 broad categories by which users can easily search the PIN database.  Users will then be able to filter the PIN dataset in order to download interactions experimentally determined by their evidence types of interest.