The value of negative results

Negative results are similarly important than positive results for science advances. Indeed, a large number if hypothesis could be excluded if we considered negative results from other studies. Unfortunately, negative results are not so easily accepted and published in peer reviewed journal, thus are not available for science community.
Scientists from the German Research Centre for Environmental Health and from the University of Munich spent their time to collect negative results from protein-protein interaction studies and built a database, called “negatome”. They used data from literature search and from structural information retrieved into Protein Data Bank and identified almost two thousand of not interacting pairs. The novelty is that the not-interaction is experimentally demonstrated and published, while in previous work not- interaction was determined from not co-localization: if two proteins are differentially located, they will not interact. This sentence could be true, but is not predictive of interaction, just co-localization. The Negatome can contain some false negative pairs, but in general it can be considered a useful tool to compare and confirm results from immunoprecipitation or two hybrid system or other techniques that usually generate some false positive. We hope that this example should be followed by other databases for negative results.