FPPI: Fusarium graminearum protein-protein interaction database.

The fungal pathogen Fusarium graminearum (telomorph Gibberella zeae) is the causal agent of several destructive crop diseases. Identifying interactions among F. graminearum proteins and understanding their functions can provide insights into pathogenic mechanisms underlying F. graminearum-host interactions. F. graminearum protein-protein interaction (FPPI) database provides comprehensive information of protein-protein interactions (PPIs) of F. graminearum predicted based on both interologs from several PPI databases of seven species and domain-domain interactions experimentally determined based on protein structures. FPPI contains 223,166 interactions among 7406 proteins for F. graminearum. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first PPI map for this destructive fungus, which is thereby expected to shed light on biological functions of F. graminearum proteins. The predicted interactome covers about 52% of the whole F. graminearum proteome, and each interaction is assigned a score as the confidence for the predicted PPI. In particular, we constructed a core PPI data set with high confidence that consists of 27,102 interactions and 3745 proteins. To verify the reliability of the predicted interactome, we conducted yeast two-hybrid experiments over 3 randomly selected predictions from the core PPI data set, among which one pair of proteins was confirmed to indeed interact with each other, thereby proving high confidence on the core PPI data set. In addition, FPPI contains other functional information for F. graminearum genes, including homologues in other species deposited in different databases and the inferred functional characteristics, and so on. We further constructed an intuitive query interface for the database that provides easy access to the important features of proteins. In summary, FPPI is a rich source of information for system-level understanding of gene functions and biological processes in F. graminearum. Public access to the FPPI database is available at http://csb.shu.edu.cn/fppi.