The prey-only interactome is 36.3% written, not 0% - the census, by identity, of all 212 human prey-only partners of the six core proteins
also called prey-only census · by-product interactome coverage · q160 denominator
The project has been saying that the 'leftover' half of the interaction list - proteins seen only as passengers in somebody else's experiment - is completely unwritten. Counting them one by one against what is actually on disk, 77 of 212 already have an entry.
The same thing, for a scientist
**The ledger claim is `100% of the directed-evidence (bait-supported) interactome is written, 0% of the prey-only`. The second half is false.** Re-derived live this cycle against the **IntAct REST** endpoint (not PSICQUIC), across all six core baits plus the two KMT2A taspase1 processed chains: **316 distinct partners, 71 bait-supported anywhere, 245 prey-only rows.** Cleaning that denominator - 3 rows are not proteins at all (two ChEBI small molecules and the bare string `DIP`), 30 resolve to non-human organisms on positive UniProt evidence - leaves **212 human prey-only partners. 77 already have an entry (36.3%); 135 do not; only 19 of the 135 are unmentioned anywhere in the corpus** [E1]. Identities for all 212 are persisted in `census.json`, which is the point: rule 90 exists because the predecessor analysis computed the list and wrote only its length. **The endpoint change matters and is reported as an instrument change, not a silent correction** (rule 93): PSICQUIC gives 146 global prey-only accessions where REST gives 245, and **one protein PSICQUIC graded prey-only (Q04206, RELA) has a bait record in REST** [E2].
The numbers, and where each one comes from
| step | n | source |
|---|---|---|
| records pulled, six baits + 2 KMT2A chains, deduplicated by interaction AC | 879 | IntAct REST findInteractions 1 |
| distinct partners | 316 | this analysis |
| bait-supported for at least one of the six | 71 | this analysis |
| prey-only rows | 245 | this analysis |
minus rows that are not proteins (CHEBI:39112, CHEBI:45783, DIP) | 242 | this analysis |
| minus non-human on positive UniProt evidence | 212 | UniProt REST, resolved live 3 |
| with an entry already (accession OR node id OR gene_symbol/alias) | 77 (36.3%) | join against the 2,927 node files present when the join ran |
| without an entry | 135 (63.7%) | |
| of those, never mentioned anywhere in the corpus | 19 | word-boundary scan of the serialised node set |
Per-bait record counts: KMT2A 315, AFF4 171, MEN1 136, PSIP1 114, AFF1 81, DOT1L 62.
The corpus is being written concurrently and the denominator of node files moves: 2,927 at the moment of the join, 2,938 excluding this beat a short time later. The coverage FRACTION is stable under that (a new entry would have to be one of these 135 partners to move it) but the node count should be read with its timestamp. The presence test is deliberately generous, the same three-way join the directed-evidence recheck uses, so 135 is a ceiling on the gap and 77 a floor on the coverage. It is also too generous in one direction and that is corrected in a sibling entry: a no match from a symbol-keyed join is not a gap, and 30 of the 135 turn out to be the subject of an existing entry under the interface-<bait>-<partner>-<reason> naming convention.
Why the old figure said zero, and why nobody caught it
The 0% of the prey-only half of the claim comes from cycle 34, in the same sentence as the 100% of the directed-evidence half. The directed half has been re-measured four times since (100% → 68.5% → 94.3% → 51/51). The prey-only half has never been re-measured at all, because the sentence's rhetorical work was done by the first half: it justified not dispatching an interactome beat, and once no beat runs, nothing goes looking.
There is a second reason and it is structural. Between cycle 34 and now, at least five beats wrote prey-only partners without calling them that - q126-the-partners-named-but-never-written, q128-the-menin-interactome-that-is-not-chromatin, q129-the-never-discussed-partners-of-kmt2a-and-psip1, q132-interactome-tail-promotion, q136-interactome-tail-size-and-abundance. The 77 covered partners are largely their output. The coverage figure did not go stale because the work was not done; it went stale because the work was done under a different name. That is a different failure from rule 90's and needs a different fix: a coverage line has to be regenerated from the id set, not from a memory of which beats ran.
The instrument change, carrying both numbers (rule 93)
Both of this project's interactome analyses query PSICQUIC as id:<accession>. This one queries the IntAct REST findInteractions endpoint and additionally pulls Q03164-PRO_0000390949 and Q03164-PRO_0000390950, the taspase1 N320 and C180 chains.
PSICQUIC (interactome-bait-versus-prey, 2026-09-21) | IntAct REST (here, 2026-09-24) | |
|---|---|---|
| KMT2A records | 156 with a partner | 315 |
| global prey-only accessions | 146 | 245 |
| clean human prey-only denominator | 130 | 212 |
| prey-only coverage | 56/130 = 43.1% | 77/212 = 36.3% |
The coverage percentage FALLS when the better instrument is used, while the graph got strictly better - exactly the direction rule 93 warns about. Both figures are reported. The 36.3% is the one to quote, because 43.1% is a percentage of a population the query could not fully see.
One grade actually flips. Q04206 (RELA/p65) is prey-only in the PSICQUIC grading and has a bait record in REST. A protein graded prey-only on a partial record set is not conservatively graded - it is over-graded, in the direction that makes the prey-only population look larger than it is.
What is NOT in this denominator, and why that matters more than the number
This census is bounded by IntAct curation of the six named human proteins. It therefore cannot see:
- Any interactor of the FUSION protein as such. Every bait here is a wild-type component.
analyses/directed-interactome-coverage-recheckhad to excludeQ8TD98('MLL/AF4 fusion protein', 624 aa) andQ2Q440('MLL/ENL fusion protein', 20 aa) from its denominator as constructs rather than partners. Those two accessions are the only trace of the fusion itself in this record set, and one of them is a twenty-residue junction fragment. - Anything in a paper nobody curated. IntAct coverage of a 1990s co-IP is patchy.
- Anything where our protein is prey to a bait outside the six and the depositor filed it under the bait only.
So the honest framing of the PI's first priority is not the prey-only tail is unwritten. It is: the tail is two-thirds unwritten, one flipped grade shows the grading itself is instrument-dependent, and no bait in the entire record set is the oncoprotein.
| script | analyses/q160-the-prey-only-interactome/census.py |
|---|---|
| status | run |
| result summary | 212 human prey-only partners of the six core proteins; 77 (36.3%) already have an entry; 135 do not; 19 of the 135 are unmentioned anywhere in the corpus. The ledger's '0% of the prey-only is written' is false. |
inputs
[ "analyses/q160-the-prey-only-interactome/rest-roles.json", "analyses/q160-the-prey-only-interactome/uniprot-cache.json", "data/graph/nodes/*/*.json" ]
measurements — the numbers behind the chart
[
{
"quantity": "coverage_fraction",
"subject": "prey-only partners of KMT2A|AFF1|AFF4|MEN1|PSIP1|DOT1L with an entry in this graph",
"value": 0.363,
"units": null,
"n": 212,
"universe": "IntAct REST findInteractions, six baits plus two KMT2A taspase1 chains, 2026-09-24; human only; prey-only = no bait record for any of the six; join = accession OR node id OR gene_symbol/alias over 2,927 node files",
"null": null,
"note": "77 of 212. The ledger claim this replaces is 0%."
},
{
"quantity": "coverage_fraction",
"subject": "the same population graded on the PSICQUIC endpoint instead",
"value": 0.431,
"units": null,
"n": 130,
"universe": "analyses/interactome-bait-versus-prey/results.json, PSICQUIC id:<accession>, generated 2026-09-21; same human filter and same join",
"null": null,
"note": "56 of 130. Reported alongside the REST figure as an instrument change, per rule 93; the percentage FALLS on the better endpoint."
},
{
"quantity": "count",
"subject": "prey-only accessions that are not proteins at all",
"value": 3,
"units": "accessions",
"n": 245,
"universe": "prey-only rows returned by IntAct REST for the six baits, 2026-09-24",
"null": null,
"note": "CHEBI:39112, CHEBI:45783 and the bare string DIP - a source-database token in an identifier field."
},
{
"quantity": "count",
"subject": "prey-only partners graded prey-only by PSICQUIC that have a bait record in IntAct REST",
"value": 1,
"units": "accessions",
"n": 146,
"universe": "PSICQUIC global prey-only set intersected with the REST bait-supported set",
"null": null,
"note": "Q04206 (RELA). The error runs in the direction that inflates the prey-only population."
}
]- A coverage figure that rises as beats run is the figure most likely to be used to stop dispatching beats. The cycle-34 sentence did exactly that for seven cycles on the directed half; nothing stops the 36.3% being used the same way. It should be regenerated from the id set every cycle, not quoted.
- How many of the 135 uncovered partners would survive the criteria q128 and q129 already applied - compartment compatibility, expression in the host line, spoke expansion, endogenous side? Those beats declined more partners than they wrote, and nothing predicts the accept rate for the remainder.
- The 30 non-human rows include HIV-1 Tat, which binds the super elongation complex through AFF4. How many of the other 29 are real cross-species biology filed under the wrong denominator rather than noise?
- Does any deposited dataset anywhere use the FUSION protein as bait? The only fusion accessions in this record set are a 624 aa construct and a 20 aa junction fragment, which is the strongest available statement of how little direct evidence exists.
- E1established confidence 5 of 5: Multiple independent lines of evidence; treated as settled in the field.database
Pulled live 2026-09-24 from the IntAct REST findInteractions endpoint for Q03164, Q03164-PRO_0000390949, Q03164-PRO_0000390950, P51825, Q9UHB7, O00255, O75475 and Q8TEK3: 879 interaction records after de-duplication by interaction AC, 316 distinct partners, 71 bait-supported for at least one of the six, 245 prey-only rows, of which 3 are not UniProt accessions (CHEBI:39112, CHEBI:45783 and the bare string DIP) and 30 resolve to non-human organisms. The clean human prey-only denominator is 212, of which 77 have an entry in this graph and 135 do not.
IntAct molecular interaction database, REST findInteractions, pulled 2026-09-24 by q160; scripts analyses/q160-the-prey-only-interactome/intact-rest.py and census.py, outputs rest-roles.json and census.json · IntAct (EMBL-EBI) 2026What this evidence cannot show
A record is a PSI-MI assay annotation, not an experiment. De-duplication is by interaction AC, which does NOT collapse a single screen split across prey-pooling, array and validated-two-hybrid labels; the corpus already records that trap for four AFF4 partners. The counts are therefore record counts, and the ranking in census.json uses distinct PMIDs rather than record counts for exactly that reason. The presence join is generous (accession OR node id OR gene_symbol/alias) and still misses the interface-<bait>-<partner> naming convention, which a sibling entry corrects.
Evidence that argues against this (1)
- The IntAct record set is itself a curation artefact and has been shown wrong in this project before: UTP18 occupies WDR5's slot in the two curated experiments from PMID 15199122, an error deposited 2005-06-03 that invented a gap and hid gene-wdr5 for two cycles. A census built on IntAct inherits every such error, and nothing in this analysis would detect a second one. Yokoyama A et al. 2004
- E2established confidence 5 of 5: Multiple independent lines of evidence; treated as settled in the field.dataset
The PSICQUIC-based grading in analyses/interactome-bait-versus-prey/results.json (regenerated 2026-09-21) yields 146 global prey-only accessions and a clean human denominator of 130, of which 56 have an entry (43.1%). Against IntAct REST the same grading yields 245 prey-only accessions and a denominator of 212 with 77 covered (36.3%). One accession, Q04206, is graded prey-only by PSICQUIC and has a bait record in REST.
What this evidence cannot show
The two runs are three days apart, so a small part of the difference could in principle be new depositions rather than endpoint reach. That is not plausible as the main cause - the KMT2A record count roughly doubles - but it is not separately controlled here and the honest statement is that endpoint reach dominates and deposition drift is unquantified.
Evidence that argues against this (1)
- Switching endpoints is not free of cost: REST returns spoke-expanded rows and large-atlas rows that PSICQUIC's narrower reach happened to filter, so part of the 99 extra prey-only accessions is low-grade material rather than recovered signal. The correct reading is that REST is more complete, not that it is cleaner. IntAct (EMBL-EBI) 2026
- E3established confidence 5 of 5: Multiple independent lines of evidence; treated as settled in the field.database
All 245 prey-only accessions were resolved live against the UniProt REST search endpoint for organism, gene symbol, protein name, reviewed status and length. 30 are not Homo sapiens, and they are excluded only on that positive evidence: 12 Mus musculus (including Mllt1 and Aff1 themselves), and viral and bacterial entries including HIV-1 Tat (P04608), HIV-1 Gag-Pol (P03366), SARS-CoV-2 replicase 1ab (P0DTD1), varicella-zoster ICP22 homolog (Q77NN7), La Crosse bunyavirus NS-S (Q8JPQ9), Yersinia pestis (A0A2U2GVV5) and Francisella tularensis (Q5NEM9).
UniProtKB REST search, accession/organism/gene_names/protein_name/length for 245 accessions, retrieved 2026-09-24; cached in analyses/q160-the-prey-only-interactome/uniprot-cache.json · UniProt Consortium 2026What this evidence cannot show
Exclusion is on POSITIVE evidence of non-human organism, never on a failed lookup, because the predecessor script excluded on a default and threw out 37 partners including KMT2A itself. The viral rows are excluded from the human census but are not meaningless: HIV-1 Tat binding the SEC through AFF4 is well-established biology and the Tat row is a real interaction that simply does not belong in a human-partner denominator.
Evidence that argues against this (1)
- Excluding the mouse rows is a judgement, not a fact. Mouse Mllt1 and mouse Aff1 as prey of a human bait may be genuine cross-species curation of a mouse experiment about the same biology, in which case the exclusion loses real evidence rather than noise. The rows are listed by accession in census.json so the judgement can be reversed. UniProt Consortium 2026
same failure mode measured elsewhere: a coverage figure computed inside an analysis differs from the dedicated tool
- related to →KMT2A / MLL1 — the gene that breaks
315 of the 879 IntAct REST records are KMT2A's; 91 prey-only partners
81 records; the only bait whose record set contains the fusion constructs Q8TD98 and Q2Q440
- related to →KMT2A::AFF1 (MLL-AF4), t(4;11)(q21;q23)
no bait in the entire 879-record set is the fusion protein
the clearest counter-example to 'prey-only evidence is weak by construction'
worked case: the grade tracks assay direction, not evidence strength
one of the 135 uncovered human prey-only partners
one of the 135 uncovered human prey-only partners
one of the 135 uncovered human prey-only partners
one of the 135 uncovered human prey-only partners
one of the 135 uncovered human prey-only partners
30 of the 135 apparent gaps are already the subject of an entry the tool could not see
independent prey-only census; the King's 103/62/34 split over 217 union partners is the sibling measurement on the full partner set
one of the 135 uncovered human prey-only partners
one of the 135 uncovered human prey-only partners
the census's atlas heuristic scored this publication as focused support for five partners; it is a 2,156-interaction atlas
'never mentioned in the corpus' is a relevance signal running backwards, not a novelty signal
one of the 135 uncovered human prey-only partners
one of the 135 uncovered human prey-only partners; eight of them are spliceosomal and the null is unrun
the role tallies that make the case come from the census pull
runs entirely on rest-roles.json, already on disk
the most-reproduced row among the 135 uncovered prey-only partners, and still one method
one of the 135 uncovered human prey-only partners