Comparing liver protein interactions across human, mouse and rat.

This tool helps researchers compare compound interactions with liver proteins across 3 species.
A compound can be chosen, and a report is produced showing protein interactions in humans, associated pathways, and which proteins are most similar in mouse and rat.

This is intended to help inform decisions about whether rat or mouse, or neither, is the most appropriate animal model for studying a specific interaction in humans.

Choose compound

The compound reports can be interpreted as follows:

There is a section of the report for each human protein which the compound has been predicted to interact with.

In that protein section, equivalent proteins for mouse and rat are displayed side by side, with the best matches first. A traffic light system is used to help interpret the numerical scores. Green indicates a good match, yellow a moderate match, and red a poor match. Read the traffic lights from top to bottom, proceeding until you reach a red light. The more green (and yellow) lights a protein has, the better match is is to the corresponding human protein. A greyed out traffic light indicates a value could not be calculated, (often the case for template similarity), in which case the traffic light should be skipped over and ignored, and does not imply a poor similarity score.

All green lights would indicate a very high level of similarity between the human and rodent protein, in sequence, structure, and active site interactions. All red would indicate a low level of similarity, and a poor likelyhood of the rodent protein being a good analogue of the human protein. A single green light following several red ones is indicative of a coincidental similarity, not a good overall match.

For each human protein, and matching rodent protein, a list of associated metabolic pathways is given, from the KEGG and Reactome databases, to aid in the identification of matching biological functionality.

In some cases, there is not a matching gene found in one or the other of the rodent species, in which case a blank will be left in that column.

Which one of mouse or rat is the better analogue of human will change from protein to protein. One may be a better model of some of the drug's interactions, while the other species, or neither, might be a better model of other interactions. Which is chosen will therefore depend on the interactions of interest.