At the end of February, attendees of the Cambridge Healthtech Institute (CHI) Genome Tri-Conference 2002 in Santa Clara, Calif., got their first glimpse of the Protein Atlas of the Human Genome™. Developed by Abingdon, UK-based Confirmant Ltd.—a joint venture of Abingdon, UK-based Oxford GlycoSciences Ltd. and Marconi plc of London—the protein atlas is slated for full release in June.
Explaining the purpose of the atlas, Jonathan Sheldon, Confirmant's chief technology officer and head of bioinformatics, compares it to existing protein databases. "If you look at the protein databases that are out there, they are largely hypothetical," he says. "Analysis at the genetic level also doesn't tell you much about alternative splicing or post-translational modification, or where the protein is in the cell." In contrast, Confirmant's atlas is created by sequencing proteins from normal and diseased samples using mass spectrometry, mapping them back to the genome with a computational algorithm, and ...
