Drug discovery today
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Functional proteomics approaches aim to characterize comprehensively the function of gene products, and provide a first-level understanding of cellular mechanisms. Here, we review recent techniques for the construction and prediction of large-scale protein-interaction networks, with a particular emphasis on computational processing steps and comparative assessment of the reliability and completeness of the various approaches. We also discuss the use of protein-interaction network information in functional annotation and in the generation of higher-level biological hypotheses on pathways.