Proteomics

Proteomics is an attempt to examine an organism's complete set of proteins and their interactions. This term was coined to make an analogy with genomics, and is often viewed as the "next step", but proteomics is much more complicated than genomics. Most importantly, while the genome is a rather constant entity, the proteome is constantly changing through its interactions with the genome. One organism will have radically different protein expression in different parts of its body and in different stages of its life cycle.

With completion of a rough draft of the human genome, many researchers are now looking at how genes and proteins interact to form other proteins. A surprising finding of the Human Genome Project is that there are far fewer genes in the human genome than there are proteins (~33,000 genes:~200,000 proteins). This finding shaters the early "one gene = one protein" hypothesis and presents a daunting challenge for scientists: To catalogue all human proteins and ascertain their function and interactions. Some have dubbed this the "Human Proteome Project", but no official title has yet been adopted.

The work-horse technology of proteomics is mass spectrometry