Scientists Race to Map the totality of Human Protein-Protein Interactions

Two years ago the Human Genome Project published its final draft – a protein parts list, if you will, for human cells. Noticeably missing, though, were the instructions needed to put those pieces together.

But not for long: Researchers around the world, in both academia and pharmaceutical companies, are working to compile a first draft of those plans. The result, called an “interactome” – a complete set of cellular protein-protein interactions – could arrive by year’s end. Or at least, a small fraction of it.”

“Yet, some doubt the utility of a genome-wide human interactome. The human body contains an ever-changing protein kaleidoscope that varies over time and from cell to cell. Humans have some 25,000 to 30,000 protein-coding genes, many of which can be alternatively spliced. Each tissue and cell type expresses its own unique constellation of those genes. There may therefore be an entirely separate interactome for each cell type at each moment in time, making it practically impossible to catalog all of those interactions, experts say.”

“The proteins still like each other, but perhaps never meet in the cell, he suggests. For that reason, Vidal says he defines the human interactome as all protein-protein interactions that are possible, not necessarily the reactions that happen.”

… And of course, we’re only talking protein-protein interactions, not protein-DNA interactions…. And we’re not addressing phosphorylation states and glycosylation patterns……. And… And ….and….

We finally get the progress/thermometer bar to finally have a little bit of color.

With hundreds of cell types, stages, conditions, are we 1/1000th there?
How fast can the progress bar proceed from here on out when combined with gene and protein expression data?

Is it too optimistic to hope for 2010 for a first draft of bottom-up model of human molecular physiology? 2015?

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Article by Joel Bellenson.