ProteinWeaver: A Webtool to Visualize Ontology-Annotated Protein Networks

Abstract

Molecular interaction networks are a vital tool for studying biological systems. While many tools exist that visualize a protein or a pathway within a network, no tool provides the ability for a researcher to consider a proteins position in a network in the context of a specific biological process or pathway. We developed ProteinWeaver, a web-based tool designed to visualize and analyze non-human protein interaction networks by integrating known biological functions. ProteinWeaver provides users with an intuitive interface to situate a user-specified protein in a user-provided biological context (as a Gene Ontology term) in five model organisms. Protein-Weaver also reports the presence of physical and regulatory network motifs within the queried subnetwork and statistics about the proteins distance to the biological process or pathway within the network. These insights can help researchers generate testable hypotheses about the proteins potential role in the process or pathway under study. Two cell biology case studies demonstrate ProteinWeavers potential to generate hypotheses from the queried subnetworks. ProteinWeaver is available at https://proteinweaver.reedcompbio.org/.