I have to store biological interactions in a Neo4j database. For example, consider a scenario where I have two types of nodes, Protein & Experiment and a relationship INTERACTS_WITH. The relationship exists as (Protein)-[INTERACTS_WITH]-(Protein). Now, the INTERACTS_WITH also relates to Experiment because this biological interaction was observed in that experiment.
I need to relate the INTERACTS_WITH relationship to the Experiments. One way to achieve this can be to store the ID of all such Experiments in an array type property of the INTERACTS_WITH relationship. But that will be just like storing the Primary Key of an entity as Foreign Key of another entity in the relational database, which I want to avoid. Another way can be to create an Interaction node for each pair of interacting genes and then relate it to the two Proteins and the Experiments. But an interaction is possible between two Protein nodes only, so I will have to programmatically put a constraint on the number of Protein nodes that relate to an Interaction node. This approach is also not good because INTERACTS_WITH is actually a relationship and perhaps it will be not a good idea to model it as a node. Is there a better, graphical way to do this? If not, which of the above two approaches will be better? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Neo4j" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
