Research progress in protein-protein interactions and their inhibitors

Protein-protein interactions play important roles in a wide range of biological processes. Gene regulation, immune response, signal transduction, cellular architecture and many other mechanisms of cellular control are involved in the interactions of protein and protein. So the discovery of drugs that could prohibit protein-protein interactions has become a very active research field in recent years. However, it is full of challenge to design such inhibitors because of the unique properties of the protein-protein interfaces. For example, the interface is usually big and rather flat. In this review, we focused on the properties of protein- protein interactions, the interactions between these properties and the design of inhibitors. Computational methods predicting protein-protein interactions as well as classification and features of inhibitors targeting protein-protein interactions were also discussed. At last, an example of how to design inhibitors to block bindings of protein and protein was given.