BMC Research Notes (Oct 2009)

pISTil: a pipeline for yeast two-hybrid Interaction Sequence Tags identification and analysis

  • de Chassey Benoît,
  • Vidalain Pierre-Olivier,
  • Meyniel Laurène,
  • Pellet Johann,
  • Tafforeau Lionel,
  • Lotteau Vincent,
  • Rabourdin-Combe Chantal,
  • Navratil Vincent

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/1756-0500-2-220
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2, no. 1
p. 220

Abstract

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Abstract Background High-throughput screening of protein-protein interactions opens new systems biology perspectives for the comprehensive understanding of cell physiology in normal and pathological conditions. In this context, yeast two-hybrid system appears as a promising approach to efficiently reconstruct protein interaction networks at the proteome-wide scale. This protein interaction screening method generates a large amount of raw sequence data, i.e. the ISTs (Interaction Sequence Tags), which urgently need appropriate tools for their systematic and standardised analysis. Findings We develop pISTil, a bioinformatics pipeline combined with a user-friendly web-interface: (i) to establish a standardised system to analyse and to annotate ISTs generated by two-hybrid technologies with high performance and flexibility and (ii) to provide high-quality protein-protein interaction datasets for systems-level approach. This pipeline has been validated on a large dataset comprising more than 11.000 ISTs. As a case study, a detailed analysis of ISTs obtained from yeast two-hybrid screens of Hepatitis C Virus proteins against human cDNA libraries is also provided. Conclusion We have developed pISTil, an open source pipeline made of a collection of several applications governed by a Perl script. The pISTil pipeline is intended to laboratories, with IT-expertise in system administration, scripting and database management, willing to automatically process large amount of ISTs data for accurate reconstruction of protein interaction networks in a systems biology perspective. pISTil is publicly available for download at http://sourceforge.net/projects/pistil.