杏吧原创

REMEMBER the human genome, the 鈥渂ook of life鈥� published amid much fanfare in
February? Already it seems to have become a tad pass茅, even though the
final version will not be completed until 2003.

Attention has now turned to the human proteome project, the effort launched
last February to catalogue all our proteins. And it鈥檚 not the only 鈥�-ome鈥�.
There鈥檚 the glycosome, all the sugars adorning proteins, and the metabolome, the
catalogue of all our metabolites.

But 2001 belonged to the genome and, like buses, two versions of it arrived
at once. One, published in the journal Science, was pieced together by
a private company, Celera Genomics of Maryland. The other, assembled by an
international consortium of publicly funded labs, was published in Nature.

鈥淭he publications were important landmarks and will be classic papers,
referred to for many decades,鈥� says Alan Bradley, director of the Sanger Centre
in Cambridge, which is carrying out much of the sequencing for the public
project. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a monumental achievement.鈥�

Both the public and private versions of the genome are very
similar鈥攚hich is hardly surprising given that Celera cribbed a lot of the
data from its public rival. But there was a shock when both teams found only
around 30,000 genes, not the expected 100,000.

Now the challenge is to understand how we get by with so few. One way to do
this will be comparing our genome to others. Celera and a public consortium are
well on the way to sequencing the mouse genome, and a draft of the pufferfish鈥檚
genome has also been completed.

But watch proteomics edging towards centre stage, as it looks the best bet
for explaining how we cope with so few genes. A single gene can churn out dozens
of different proteins, each of which can then combine with proteins from other
genes.