Developing a library of cancer proteins
Ten years after the first human genome was sequenced, science is about to reach a new milestone. Researchers are now turning their attention to the products which use genes as instructions for their assembly: the proteins. There are 21,000 genes in the entire human genome, and the scientific research team around Matthias Mann from the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried estimates that approx. 12,000 proteins are produced in typical human cells. This implies an enormous volume of data, particularly considering that the researchers - in contrast to genome analysis - do not just want to identify all proteins in the cells. To understand all of the cell's processes, they must also know the quantities in which these proteins exist and how they are further changed in the cells.