Scientists map human-viral protein interactions to reveal mechanisms for virus infection

Viruses are parasitic microorganisms within cells that use cellular mechanisms through the interaction of proteins, which cells also rely on to initiate immune response mechanisms for virus invasionTherefore, understanding the interactions between proteins is critical to understanding the relationship between viruses and host cellsCurrently, scientists are mainly using high-throughput methods to study protein interactions, and while many new discoveries have been made, the lack of scalability of this approach also limits researchThis time, the computational framework P-HIPSTer, developed by researchers at Columbia University, uses protein structure information to infer the interaction between viral proteins and human proteins, effectively remedying the lack of scalability of the high-throughput methodUsing P-HIPSTer, researchers studied more than 1,000 known human-infected viruses and about 13,000 proteins encoded, and eventually mapped the human-viral protein interactionsThe map covers about 282,000 possible interaction protein pairs, and the biological information it reveals is of great value to human immunology and infectious disease researchin addition to identifying human-viral protein interactions, P-HIPSTer has also helped researchers obtain a wealth of information about how viruses infect human cells and cause disease, including the role of estrogen receptors in regulating Zika virus infection, how HPV causes cancer, how the virus affects the human genome, and moreresearchers say scientists do not know much about the interactions between viral proteins and human proteins, and hope that the new map will provide the scientific community with more research resources and help scientists gain more biological informationNext, they plan to use P-HIPSTer for the study of more complex pathogens, such as parasites and bacteria, which they may use in the future to study viruses or pathogens that affect crops or livestock.