As Robert Service writes in an excellent overview of the field in the September 26 issue of Science, proteomics is finally coming of age.
On the drawing board is a Human Proteome Project (HPP), a massive undertaking that will make the Human Genome Project look tame in comparison.
While there is no guarantee the project will go ahead, proteomics researchers from all over the world are in intense discussions on how to go about it. The number one issue is, of course, funding, which in today’s economic climate is going to prove a massive hurdle.
Bringing different international funding agencies together for a coordinated effort will be enormously difficult, so many research groups are attacking the issue from a national perspective.
Service reported that Genome Canada is considering a project aimed at using lentiviruses to insert tagged proteins into each of the 20,000-odd genes in the genome, and that the South Korean Government is looking at funding a pilot project to catalogue all of the proteins of chromosome 13, the second smallest chromosome, with 319 genes.
This follows a proposal by the Human Proteome Organisation (HUPO) to catalogue the smallest, chromosome 21.
For Dr Michelle Hill, who is on the organising committee of the Lorne proteomics conference, it is an exciting time for the field. “(Proteomics leaders) are proposing to characterise the whole proteome, in every tissue,” she says.
“It is going to cost a lot of money and is a huge undertaking. We’ve got several speakers coming from this program to Lorne, where it will be one of the main themes, along with metabolomics and mass imaging.”
Hill herself is facing a new challenge in proteomics – its application in a clinical setting. While the field has wide application in many areas of molecular research, clinical applications are still in their infancy.
Next year, Hill is moving from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience to the Diamantina Institute to begin a series of projects on Barrett’s oesophagus and oesophageal cancer, hoping to track down some biomarkers for potential diagnostic tests.
“(Clinical proteomics) is challenging but genes don’t tell you everything,” she says. “And a lot of things that happen in metabolism are post-translational.”
