WIKIMEDIA, NICOLLE RAGER, NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATIONUsing the quantity of messenger RNA (mRNA) as a proxy for protein abundance could be risky, concludes a paper published in PLOS Computational Biology today (May 22). The authors examined data from previous proteomic studies, and their new statistical calculations revealed that while mRNA levels can be a useful guide to protein levels when comparing different genes, relying on mRNA to evaluate the same gene in different tissues can be rather misleading.
“There has been controversy over the question of how well mRNA levels can predict protein levels,” said cell and molecular biologist Marko Jovanovic of Columbia University who was not involved in the study. “A few papers claim that their predictive power is very limited, others say they predict it very well. . . . The problem [is] that it depends what you are looking at—are you interested in the expression differences of different genes within the same tissues, or of the same gene in different tissues? Here, [the authors] have nicely separated these two, which is crucially important.”
In 2014, two papers published in Nature provided the first draft maps of the human proteome—each detailing the abundance and distribution of the assorted proteins throughout the ...
