New Database Collates Information About Proteins

The newly released MissingProteinPedia database collates information about proteins, and allows Human Proteome Project scientists to gain a deeper understanding of how our proteins work together. The database is aiding in the identification of 2,949 “missing” human proteins yet to be proven to exist. The database, made by scientists at Macquarie, will be a powerful tool in helping all researchers pinpoint every protein found in the human body, and how these interact with potential repercussions for better understanding many diseases.

“While we know a lot about individual proteins, the larger picture of how these proteins work together to make an individual person is a difficult concept to explore. Although we are developing new technologies to test when, where, why and how proteins are expressed, we still need some way of tying all the biological information together so that we get a clearer picture of how proteins work together to turn us into an individual human being,” explained Professor Mark Baker, lead author of the missing protein study.

“Our team developed MissingProteinPedia to gather all the scattered and incomplete information about what the Human Proteome Project calls missing proteins. This includes the 2,949 proteins that, despite rigorous testing, are still ‘in the shadows’ and haven’t yet been proven to exist,” he added. The tool accelerates the discovery of many missing proteins, particularly those in elusive protein families, with potentially vast consequences for human disease.

“In order to understand how a disease progresses we need a detailed picture of how all proteins work in a healthy individual, so that we can understand what triggers the development of diseases,” explained senior author Professor Shoba Ranganathan. MissingProteinPedia has uncovered substantial evidence for many hard-to-detect proteins for which small amounts of information have taken years to gather. The very fact that we have come so far in such a short time bodes well for our understanding of complex human diseases such as cancer,” she added.

The researchers will make the database a community-driven, citizen-science project where everyone can help in the discovery of human missing proteins and their role in health and disease.

Reference:
Baker, M. S., Ahn, S. B., Mohamedali, A., Islam, M. T., Cantor, D., Verhaert, P. D., Ranganathan, S. (2017). Accelerating the search for the missing proteins in the human proteome. Nature Communications, 8, 14271. doi:10.1038/ncomms14271

This article has been republished from materials provided by Macquarie University. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.