  Predictive understanding of the myriads of signal transduction pathways in a
cell is an outstanding challenge of systems biology. Such pathways are
primarily mediated by specific but transient protein-protein interactions,
which are difficult to study experimentally. In this study, we dissect the
specificity of protein-protein interactions governing two-component signaling
(TCS) systems ubiquitously used in bacteria. Exploiting the large number of
sequenced bacterial genomes and an operon structure which packages many pairs
of interacting TCS proteins together, we developed a computational approach to
extract a molecular interaction code capturing the preferences of a small but
critical number of directly interacting residue pairs. This code is found to
reflect physical interaction mechanisms, with the strongest signal coming from
charged amino acids. It is used to predict the specificity of TCS interaction:
Our results compare favorably to most available experimental results, including
the prediction of 7 (out of 8 known) interaction partners of orphan signaling
proteins in Caulobacter crescentus. Surveying among the available bacterial
genomes, our results suggest 15~25% of the TCS proteins could participate in
out-of-operon "crosstalks". Additionally, we predict clusters of crosstalking
candidates, expanding from the anecdotally known examples in model organisms.
The tools and results presented here can be used to guide experimental studies
towards a system-level understanding of two-component signaling.
