Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

Unified Human Interactome (UniHI) (http://www.unihi.org) is a database for retrieval, analysis and visualization of human molecular interaction networks. Its primary aim is to provide a comprehensive and easy-to-use platform for network-based investigations to a wide community of researchers in biology and medicine. Here, we describe a major update (version 7) of the database previously featured in NAR Database Issue. UniHI 7 currently includes almost 350,000 molecular interactions between genes, proteins and drugs, as well as numerous other types of data such as gene expression and functional annotation. Multiple options for interactive filtering and highlighting of proteins can be employed to obtain more reliable and specific network structures. Expression and other genomic data can be uploaded by the user to examine local network structures. Additional built-in tools enable ready identification of known drug targets, as well as of biological processes, phenotypes and pathways enriched with network proteins. A distinctive feature of UniHI 7 is its user-friendly interface designed to be utilized in an intuitive manner, enabling researchers less acquainted with network analysis to perform state-of-the-art network-based investigations.

Human protein interaction maps have become important tools of biomedical research for the elucidation of molecular mechanisms and the identification of new modulators of disease processes. The Unified Human Interactome database (UniHI, http://www.unihi.org) provides researchers with a comprehensive platform to query and access human protein-protein interaction (PPI) data. Since its first release, UniHI has considerably increased in size. The latest update of UniHI includes over 250,000 interactions between approximately 22,300 unique proteins collected from 14 major PPI sources. However, this wealth of data also poses new challenges for researchers due to the complexity of interaction networks retrieved from the database. We therefore developed several new tools to query, analyze and visualize human PPI networks. Most importantly, UniHI allows now the construction of tissue-specific interaction networks and focused querying of canonical pathways. This will enable researchers to target their analysis and to prioritize candidate proteins for follow-up studies.