Protein Functions and Biological Contexts

The availability of a rough draft of the predicted human proteome allows an evaluation of the extent to which the predicted and biochemical functions of proteins are in alignment, and the roles of different technologies and approaches to understanding human diseases and instantiating therapeutics. Microarray technologies at the transcriptomic and proteomic levels can be high throughput and excellent for diagnostic purposes, but their informational outputs are inferior in quality to those emerging from the co- and post-translational levels and from antibody-based molecular anatomy. It is now abundantly clear that data transfer between the transcriptome and proteome is not straightforward, and that increasing emphasis needs to be placed on pure proteomic approaches at the structural, quantitative, cell biological and phenomic levels, with special focus on embryogenic and foetal processes. Finally, the precision genetic engineering that is required to evaluate the functional significance of context-dependent protein interactions underpinned by post-translational modifications and proteolytic cleavage events, is still too time consuming and rudimentary to be implemented on a large scale in the mouse, and basic principles and first order networks will need to be sorted out in even simpler model systems such as Drosophila.