The Interactorium: visualising proteins, complexes and interaction networks in a virtual 3-D cell.

Here, we describe the Interactorium, a tool in which a Virtual Cell is used as the context for the seamless visualisation of the yeast protein interaction network, protein complexes and protein 3-D structures. The tool has been designed to display very complex networks of up to 40 000 proteins or 6000 multiprotein complexes and has a series of toolboxes and menus to allow real-time data manipulation and control the manner in which data are displayed. It incorporates new algorithms that reduce the complexity of the visualisation by the generation of putative new complexes from existing data and by the reduction of edges through the use of protein "twins" when they occur in multiple locations.