Proteomics, the study of an organism's complete complement of proteins, picks up where the Human Genome Project left off, asking what proteins each gene codes for and what they do in the body. It enables researchers to identify and quantify all the proteins in a cell, tissue or even a complete organism and investigate their structures and functions information that's expected to yield big dividends in both pediatric and adult medicine.
"To really understand biological processes, we need to understand how proteins function in and around cells since they are the functioning units," says Hanno Steen, PhD, director of the newly opened Proteomics Center at Children's Hospital Boston, one of just a handful of proteomics facilities in the Boston area.
At Children's, researchers in fields such as orthopedics, nephrology, neuroscience and cancer are studying how genetic variations lead to disease and are searching for diagnostic and prognostic markers that can be used in patients. (For more information, see http://www.childrenshospital.org/newsroom/Site1339/mainpageS1339P1sublevel188.html.)
While similar to genomics, proteomics is far more complex: proteins have much more complicated structures than genes do, and while the genome is essentially hard-wired, the proteome continually changes. And the proteome is much larger than the genome: the 35,000 genes in the human genome co
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Contact: Aaron Patnode
aaron.patnode@childrens.harvard.edu
617-355-6420
Children's Hospital Boston
22-Feb-2006