Protein-protein interaction : heterodimers and homodimers

Abstract

Protein-protein interaction is amongst the ubiquitous type of interactions in biological systems and plays a key role in all cellular processes. These interactions are largely protein dimers (two body collision). The dimers are either heterodimers (complexation of non-identical monomers) or homodimers (complexation of identical monomers). Thousands of such dimer structures have been collected and documented at the PDB. However, our knowledge on these interactions is far from satisfactory. Therefore, it is our interest to study dimer interface properties to use them for detecting potential interaction sites. We used a non-redundant dataset of 156 heterodimers and 170 homodimers determined by X-ray crystallography with high resolution (2.5A) for this purpose.