Proteomics and Bioinformatics Soon to Resolve the Human Structural Interactome

Copyright: © 2012 Nebel JC. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Following the completion of the Human Genome Project, came the humbling discovery that humans possess barely more protein-coding genes than the roundworm. Since then, humans’ greater complexity has been substantiated by finely tuned regulatory and expression mechanisms, alternative splicing and post-translational modifications, and a dense protein interaction network resulting in a highly dynamic system. Indeed, the recent publication of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE), which provides functional annotation for around 80% of the human genome, confirmed the intricate nature of gene expression control by revealing nearly 500,000 ‘promoter’ and ‘enhancer’ regions [1]. In addition, studies of post-transcriptional alterations led to size estimates of the human proteome much higher than the number of genes, usually within the 100,000-1,000,000 protein range. Whatever the actual value, the number of possible proteinprotein interactions is enormous.