Kiemer and Cesareni raise the following concerns with the state (circa 2007) of the field especially with the comparative interactomic: The experimental procedures associated with the field are error prone leading to "noisy results". This leads to 30% of all reported interactions being artifacts. In fact, two groups using the same techniques on the same organism found less than 30% interactions in common. However, some authors have argued that such non-reproducibility results from the extraordinary sensitivity of various methods to small experimental variation. For instance, identical conditions in Y2H assays result in very different interactions when different Y2H vectors are used.
Techniques may be biased, i.e. the technique determines which interactions are found. In fact, any method has built in biases, especially protein methods. Because every protein is different no method can capture the properties of each protein. For instance, most analytical methods that work fine with soluble proteins deal poorly with membrane proteins. This is also true for Y2H and AP/MS technologies.
Interactomes are not nearly complete with perhaps the exception of S. cerevisiae. This is not really a criticism as any scientific area is "incomplete" initially until the methodologies have been improved. Interactomics in 2015 is where genome sequencing was in the late 1990s, given that only a few interactome datasets are available (see table above).
While genomes are stable, interactomes may vary between tissues, cell types, and developmental stages. Again, this is not a criticism, but rather a description of the challenges in the field.
It is difficult to match evolutionarily related proteins in distantly related species. While homologous DNA sequences can be found relatively easily, it is much more difficult to predict homologous interactions ("interologs") because the homologs of two interacting proteins do not need to interact. For instance, even within a proteome two proteins may interact but their paralogs may not.
Each protein–protein interactome may represent only a partial sample of potential interactions, even when a supposedly definitive version is published in a scientific journal. Additional factors may have roles in protein interactions that have yet to be incorporated in interactomes. The binding strength of the various protein interactors, microenvironmental factors, sensitivity to various procedures, and the physiological state of the cell all impact protein–protein interactions, yet are usually not accounted for in interactome studies.