OpenPIP: An Open-source Platform for Hosting, Visualizing and Analyzing Pro-tein Interaction Data

Knowing which proteins interact with each other is essential information for understanding how most bio-logical processes at the cellular and organismal level operate and how their perturbation can cause dis-ease. Continuous technical and methodological advances over the last two decades have led to many genome-wide systematically-generated protein-protein interaction (PPI) maps. To help store, visualize, analyze and disseminate these specialized experimental datasets via the web, we developed the freely-available Open-source Protein Interaction Platform (openPIP) as a customizable web portal designed to host experimental PPI maps. Such a portal is often required to accompany a paper describing the experimental data set, in addition to depositing the data in a standard repository. No coding skills are required to set up and customize the database and web portal. OpenPIP has been used to build the data-bases and web portals of two major protein interactome maps, the Human and Yeast Reference Protein Interactome maps (HuRI and YeRI, respectively). OpenPIP is freely available as a ready-to-use Docker container for hosting and sharing PPI data with the scientific community at http://openpip.baderlab.org/ and the source code can be downloaded from

Automated summary

Understanding protein-protein interactions is crucial for studying biological processes and diseases. The development of a freely-available protein interaction platform allows for standardized storage, visualization, analysis, and dissemination of experimental data.