PPaxe: easy extraction of protein occurrence and interactions from the scientific literature

Abstract

Protein–protein interactions (PPIs) are very important to build models for understanding many biological processes. Although several databases hold many of these interactions, exploring them, selecting those relevant for a given subject and contextualizing them can be a difficult task for researchers. Extracting PPIs directly from the scientific literature can be very helpful for providing such context, as the sentences describing these interactions may give insights to researchers in helpful ways. We have developed PPaxe, a python module and a web application that allows users to extract PPIs and protein occurrence from a given set of PubMed and PubMedCentral articles. It presents the results of the analysis in different ways to help researchers export, filter and analyze the results easily.