Theme
Current Perspective of Proteins and Proteomics
In the post genomic era, the promise of protein based diagnostics is becoming more efficient and informative as the advent of proteomics explores the vast dynamic range of the proteome in biological matrix such as cells, tissue and fluids, studying the myriads of interactions, functions, composition and structures of the proteins and their intrinsic role in the molecular and cellular processes which are the basis of health and diseases.
With the completion of human genome project, high-throughput proteomics technologies combined with advanced bioinformatics are being used extensively to identify molecular signatures of diseases based on protein pathways and signaling cascades and therefore have shown to be increased in clinical applications.
Also emerging as a new research field, 'Proteogenomics', a combination of technological advancement in high-throughput next generation sequencing and deep mass spectrometry based proteomics is becoming more and more proficient in the integrative analysis of genomic and proteomic data for exome annotation in the form of gene discovery and gene model refinement (Proteomics Aiding Genome Annotation); protein level detection of single amino acid variants (SAAVs), insertions, deletions, alternative splice junctions and novel gene fusions in relation to a reference genome sequence (Personalized Protein Sequence Databases); the application of proteomic sequencing to characterize antibodies (Sequencing of Antibodies); studying the effects of viral infections and transposons on gene expression in eukaryotic organisms (Viral Infections and Activations of Transposable Elements); and to metaproteomic investigation (Metaproteogenomics).
The ‘Omics’ technologies have always been characterized by combining multi-disciplinary expertise in biology, genetics, computer science and engineering. This trend is continuing as we are now building the resources to comprehensively study how mutations affect genome structure, gene expression, protein functions and interactions to contribute to the complex phenotypic outcomes we observe in diseases and to offer new insights into future treatment.