H. HAHNE, TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITÄT MÜNCHENTwo international teams have independently produced the first drafts of the human proteome. These curated catalogs of the proteins expressed in most non-diseased human tissues and organs can be used as a baseline to better understand changes that occur in disease states. Their findings were published today (May 29) in Nature.
Both teams uncovered new complexities of the human genome, identifying novel proteins from regions of the genome previously thought to be non-coding.
“While other large proteomic data sets have been collected that cataloged up to 10,000 proteins, the real breakthrough with these two projects is the comprehensive coverage of more than 80 percent of the expected human proteome which has not been achieved previously,” said Hanno Steen, director of proteomics at Boston Children's Hospital, who was not involved in the work. “These efforts clearly show that to get to this deep level of proteome coverage, many different tissue types must be probed.”
Analyzing 30 different tissue types, Akhilesh Pandey, a proteomics researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and his colleagues at the Institute ...
