Prof. Pramod Garg, Executive Director, THSTI, launched a web-based application, “konnect2prot”, on the auspicious occasion of the 75th anniversary of Indian independence. This application is indigenously developed by Dr. Samrat Chatterjee and his group in collaboration with Dr. Shailendra Asthana and is freely available for academic purposes only.

The synergetic association between proteins regulates the biological processes and functions, hence the phenotype of all living organisms. Thus, this association, or protein-protein interactions (PPIs), as they are popularly known, pave the way for a better understanding of the disease mechanism and helps identify potential drug targets. Decades of engraving of these associations have resulted in numerous software and databases, many of which are commercial. However, a platform that provides a comprehensive understanding of these mechanisms is still a void to be filled. To address this lacuna, a group of scientists from THSTI led by Dr. Samrat Chatterjee developed an in-house open-source web-based application “konnect2prot (k2p)” with enhanced features for understanding the complex web of PPIs. It is a first-of-its-kind application to identify the triggering proteins, which are possible causal agents between various pathological or pathophysiological conditions. k2p contains data curated from various databases with multidimensional information for building a PPI network relevant to the end-user. It is equipped with several network algorithms that can further enhance the decision-making process.