Background: Recent progresses in high-throughput proteomics have provided us with a first chance to characterize protein interaction networks (PINs), but also raised new challenges in interpreting the accumulating data. Results: Motivated by the need of analyzing and interpreting the fast-growing data in the field of proteomics, we propose a comparative strategy to carry out global analysis of PINs. We compare two PINs by combining interaction topology and sequence similarity to identify conserved network substructures (CoNSs). Using this approach we perform twenty-one pairwise comparisons among the seven recently available PINs of E.coli, H.pylori, S.cerevisiae, C.elegans, D.melanogaster, M.musculus and H.sapiens. In spite of the incompleteness of data, PIN comparison discloses species conservation at the network level and the identified CoNSs are also functionally conserved and involve in basic cellular functions. We investigate the yeast CoNSs and find that many of them correspond ...