DirectContacts2: a wiring diagram of human physical protein interactions

Abstract

Cellular function is driven by the activity of proteins in stable complexes. Protein complex assembly depends on the direct physical association of component proteins. Advances in macromolecular structure prediction with tools like AlphaFold and RoseTTAFold have greatly improved our ability to model these interactions in silico, but an all-by-all analysis of the human proteome’s ~200 M possible pairs remains computationally intractable. A comprehensive cellular map of direct protein interactions will therefore be an invaluable resource to direct screening efforts. Here, we present DirectContacts2, a machine learning model that distinguishes direct from indirect protein interactions using features derived from over 25,000 mass spectrometry experiments. Applied to ~25 million human protein pairs, our model outperforms previous resources in identifying direct physical interactions and enriches for accurate structural models including ~2500 AlphaFold3 models. Our framework enables structural modeling of disease-relevant complexes (e.g. orofacial digital syndrome (OFDS) complex) offering insights into the molecular consequences of pathogenic mutations (OFD1) and broadly, establishes a highly accurate protein wiring diagram of the cell. Knowledge of the physical interactions of proteins provides mechanistic understanding of their function. Here, the authors develop a machine learning classifier through the integration of 25,000 proteomics experiments to construct a wiring diagram of human cells.