About IMEx

The IMEx Consortium is an international collaboration between a group of major public interaction data providers who have agreed to share curation effort and:

  • Develop and work to a single set of curation rules when capturing data from directly deposited interaction data, pre-prints and publications in peer-reviewed journals
  • Capture full details of an interaction in a “deep” curation model
  • Perform a complete curation of all protein-protein interactions experimentally demonstrated within a publication
  • Make these interactions available in a single search interface on a common website
  • Provide the data in standards-compliant download formats
  • Make all IMEx records freely accessible under the Creative Commons Attribution License

IMEx membership

IMEx defines three types of membership:

  1. Active: IMEx partner commits to producing relevant numbers of records curated to IMEx standard and providing these via a PSICQUIC service.
  2. Observer: Prospective IMEx Consortium member.
  3. Inactive: former IMEx partner who contributed to the establishment of the IMEx curation rules and/or have contributed data to the IMEx dataset.

List of IMEx members

The IMEx Consortium is open to the participation of additional partners.

Data Availability

All IMEx Consortium data is centralised in the IntAct database at the EMBL-EBI. Member databases curate into IntAct, then make some or all of the data available at their own websites. Currently, the entire IMEx dataset can be accessed via the IntAct website and the mentha portal. Biological domain-specific resources such as MatrixDB and HPIDB, only import specific subsets of data back into their own resources.

Data can be searched on the IMEx website and downloaded in PSI-MI XML2.5 or MITAB format, enabling users to visualize the data in a wide range of tools such as Cytoscape and the R Bioconductor software suite. Species-specific PSI-MI XML2.5 and 3.0 and MITAB2.7 files can currently be accessed on www.ebi.ac.uk/intact/downloads. Please be warned that this site contains legacy non-IMEx data from the DIP, IntAct, MINT and UniProtKB curation teams. A specific IMEx ftp site will be established later. All datasets will automatically increase with every release of the IntAct database.

Scientific Advisory Board

A panel of internationally-renowned experts advise the IMEx, IntAct and Complex Portal projects and hold a review meeting once every 18 months. Current SAB members are:

IMEx Consortium Partners

Representatives of IMEx consortium partners participate in the SAB as observers:

Licence

IntAct is an open source, open data resource, available to anyone. Usage of IntAct material is covered by two licenses:

The terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, meaning you are free to use, reproduce and adapt our data providing you give appropriate credit, apply to all IntAct data, e.g. PSI-MI XML, MI-JSON and MITAB files, as well as data directly accessed via web pages/services.

The terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0 apply to all software relating to the functionality of IntAct, derived websites and webservices, the Curator Tool, SQL and Graph Database data dumps, and Art and Branding Materials.

For attribution please go to our Publications page.

Disclaimer

We make no warranties regarding the correctness of the data, and disclaim liability for damages resulting from its use. We cannot provide unrestricted permission regarding the use of the data, as some data may be covered by patents or other rights.

Any medical or genetic information is provided for research, educational and informational purposes only. It is not in any way intended to be used as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment or care.

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