PHISTO: A New Web Platform for Pathogen-Human Interactions

Abstract

The interactions between the proteins of infectious microorganisms, pathogens, and their human hosts are the cause behind the manipulation of human cellular mechanisms by the microorganisms to their own advantage, resulting in infection in the host organism. Improved understanding of pathogen-host interactions (PHIs) will significantly contribute to our knowledge of the mechanisms involved in infection, and allow novel therapeutic solutions to be devised. In the post-genomic era, following the advances in genomics, proteomics, and then interactomics, interspecies protein interaction data of pathogen-human systems could be produced in large-scale within very recent years. PHISTO (Pathogen-Host Interaction Search Tool, www.phisto.org) is a new Web platform that provides relevant information about pathogen-host protein-protein interactions. It enables access to the most up-to-date PHI data for all pathogen types for which experimentally-verified protein interactions with human are available. The platform also offers integrated tools for visualization of PHI networks, graph theoretical analysis of human proteins targeted by pathogens and BLAST search. PHISTO aims to facilitate PHI studies that provide potential therapeutic targets for infectious diseases by offering up-to-date data through its database functionality as well as computational analysis tools.