Proteome

The term has been applied to several different types of biological systems. A cellular proteome is the collection of proteins found in a particular cell type under a particular set of environmental conditions such as exposure to hormone stimulation. It can also be useful to consider an organism's complete proteome, which can be conceptualized as the complete set of proteins from all of the various cellular proteomes. This is very roughly the protein equivalent of the genome. The term "proteome" has also been used to refer to the collection of proteins in certain sub-cellular biological systems. For example, all of the proteins in a virus can be called a viral proteome. All of the proteins in a mitochondrion make up the mitochondrial proteome which has generated its own field of study mitoproteomics.[1]

The proteome can be used to determine the presence of different types of cancers.

The proteome can be used in order to comparatively analyze different cancer cell lines. Proteomic studies have been used in order to identify the likelihood of metastasis in bladder cancer cell lines KK47 and YTS1 and were found to have 36 unregulated and 74 down regulated proteins.[2] The differences in protein expression can help identify novel cancer signaling mechanisms.

Biomarkers of cancer have been found by Mass spectrometry based proteomic analyses. The use of proteomics or the study of the proteome is a step forward in personalized medicine to tailor drug cocktails to the patients specific proteomic and genomic profile.[3] The analysis of ovarian cancer cell lines showed that putative biomarkers for ovarian cancer include "α-enolase (ENOA), elongation factor Tu, mitochondrial (EFTU), glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (G3P), stress-70 protein, mitochondrial (GRP75), apolipoprotein A-1 (APOA1), peroxiredoxin (PRDX2) and annexin A (ANXA)".[4]

Comparative proteomic analyses of 11 cell lines demonstrated the similarity between the metabolic processes of each cell line; 11,731 proteins were completely identified from this study. Housekeeping proteins tend to show greater variability between cell lines.[5]

Resistance to certain cancer drugs is still not well understood. Proteomic analysis has been used in order to identify proteins that may have anti-cancer drug properties, specifically for the colon cancer drug irinotecan.[6] Studies of adenocarcinoma cell line LoVo demonstrated that 8 proteins were unregulated and 7 proteins were down-regulated. Proteins that showed a differential expression were involved in processes such as transcription, apoptosis and cell proliferation/differentiation among others.

Proteomic analyses have been performed in different kinds of bacteria to assess their metabolic reactions to different conditions. For example, in bacteria such as Clostridium and Bacillus, proteomic analyses were used in order to investigate how different proteins help each of these bacteria spores germinate after a prolonged period of dormancy.[7] In order to better understand how to properly eliminate spores, proteomic analysis must be performed.

Marc Wilkins coined the term proteome [8] in 1994 in a symposium on "2D Electrophoresis: from protein maps to genomes" held in Siena in Italy. It appeared in print in 1995,[9] with the publication of part of his PhD thesis. Wilkins used the term to describe the entire complement of proteins expressed by a genome, cell, tissue or organism.

Assuming one gene=protein would mean that there are at least 20,000 proteins corresponding to roughly 20,000 genes for humans. The proteome can be larger than the genome, especially in eukaryotes, as more than one protein can be produced from one gene due to alternative splicing (e.g. human proteome consists 92,179 proteins out of which 71,173 are splicing variants).[10] On the other hand, not all genes are translated to proteins, and many known genes encode only RNA which is the final functional product. Moreover, complete proteome size vary depending the kingdom of life. For instance, eukaryotes, bacteria, archaea and viruses have on average 15,145, 3,200, 2,358 and 42 proteins respectively encoded in their genomes.[11]

The Plasma Proteome database contains information on 10,500 blood plasma proteins. Because the range in protein contents in plasma is very large, it is difficult to detect proteins that tend to be scarce when compared to abundant proteins. There is an analytical limit that may possibly be a barrier fro the detections of proteins with ultra low concentrations.[12]

There are different factors that are used to analyze the proteome. First, the protein width is determined by the different protein types and the protein depth is determined by the number of protein copies in particular tissues.[12] There are different factors that can add variability to proteins. SAPs (single amino acid polymorphisms) and nsSNPs non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms are key elements that can lead to different "protein species" or "proteomorphs".

The term dark proteome coined by Perdigão and colleagues, defines regions of proteins that have no detectable sequence homology to other proteins of known three-dimensional structure and therefore cannot be modeled by homology. For 546,000 Swiss-Prot proteins, 44–54% of the proteome in eukaryotes and viruses was found to be "dark", compared with only ∼14% in archaea and bacteria.[13]

Currently, there is a project called the Human Proteome Map. Much like the human genome project, the human proteome map seeks to publish all protein sequencing data onto one database. Currently the data base has proteins coded by more than 17,000 human genes. The database contains proteomic analysis from different fetal and adult tissues along with different types of hematopoietic cells. Additionally, the databases neXtprot and UniProt contain human proteomic data and ways to analyze specific profiles.

Analyzing proteins proves to be more difficult than analyzing nucleic acid sequences. While there are only 4 nucleotides that make up DNA, there are at least 20 different amino acids that can make up a protein. Additionally, there is currently no known high throughput technology to make copies of a single protein. Numerous methods are available to study proteins, sets of proteins, or the whole proteome. In fact, proteins are often studied indirectly, e.g. using computational methods and analyses of genomes. Only a few examples are given below.

Separation techniques and electrophoresis

This image shows a two-dimensional gel with color coded proteins. This is a way to visualize proteins based on their mass and isoelectric point.

Proteomics, the study of the proteome, has largely been practiced through the separation of proteins by two dimensional gel electrophoresis. In the first dimension, the proteins are separated by isoelectric focusing, which resolves proteins on the basis of charge. In the second dimension, proteins are separated by molecular weight using SDS-PAGE. The gel is stained with Coomassie Brilliant Blue or silver to visualize the proteins. Spots on the gel are proteins that have migrated to specific locations.

• Metabolome
• Cytome
• Bioinformatics
• List of omics topics in biology
• Plant Proteome Database
• Transcriptome
• Interactome
• Human Proteome Project
• BioPlex

• PIR database
• UniProt database
• Pfam database at the Library of Congress Web Archives (archived 2011-05-06)