Proteomics 101

Proteomics is sort of like genomics, you know, where genomics is the study of all the genes in an organism. Well, study of all the human proteins is "proteomics," or study of all the proteins that get expressed in our bodies.

You know, of course, a protein, I think, everybody knows, you know, it's the amino acid string that gets folded up and goes off and does a job in your body. That's a protein, but that's not high enough resolution. When you really go into the molecular level of our bodies, a single human gene can create dozens or even hundreds or low thousands of subtly different versions of the protein.

And those the world has come to call different forms of the protein, or "proteoforms" for short. And it's really clear that the human proteome is made up of all the proteoforms. We would like to create the reference proteome that would have all the sub proteomes as components of it. So we would do the liver cell types, and the brain cell types, and the kidney cell types.

So we want to determine the proteomes of all of those cell types. Because there is a large number of decorations, or, as we say in proteomics, PTMs, posttranslational modifications. If you phosphorylate a serine, or you methylate and arginine, you are creating derivatives of a protein.

We call those proteoforms. So, so the proteome is a bit different. It's not just the linear sequence. We actually need to determine those decorations, quantify those, and that's why it gets complicated. But basically what we're talking about is defining something on the order of 50 to 100 million unique proteoforms in the human proteoform project.