The Complex Portal – Molecular Assemblies in Context
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The Complex Portal (www.ebi.ac.uk/complexportal) [1] is a manually curated reference database of macromolecular complexes, providing stable identifiers and summaries of the composition, topology and function of stable protein assemblies across 28 species. By treating complexes as discrete, annotated biological entities rather than simple lists of interacting proteins, it offers a unifying view of how gene products cooperate to carry out cellular functions. This talk covers recent developments in the resource, with a focus on the expansion of its human complexome. Alongside continued expert curation, the portal now incorporates 14,964 machine-learning-predicted complexes from hu.MAP3.0 [2], complementing the 2,150 manually curated human entries and broadening coverage of the human complexome. New visualisation tools are introduced to help navigate this expanded dataset, including the Complex Navigator for comparing orthologous and paralogous complexes, and an embedded Rhea reaction viewer for examining the catalytic activity of enzyme complexes. A further theme is how the Complex Portal situates each complex alongside supporting evidence from other resources. The "Pairwise Relationships" section available on individual complex entries displays a heatmap of pairwise relationships between a complex's components, combining curated molecular interaction evidence from IntAct with protein co-expression/covariation data from ProteomeHD [3]. This offers a way to assess the experimental support underpinning both curated and predicted complexes, and to distinguish core, stably associated subunits from more context-specific or peripheral ones. The talk closes with a look at how this growing, evidence-linked complexome connects to wider resources such as IntAct, Reactome and Open Targets, and its role as a resource for drug target identification and functional genomics.
Author: Henning Hermjakob
Institution: European Bioinformatics Institute
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W7203738211