The proteome haystack

Earlier this year, Myriad Genetics Inc., Hitachi Ltd. and Oracle Corp. announced that they will map the proteome by 2004, producing a set of all possible interactions between all proteins expressed by human cells, and predicting protein pathways based on the interaction data. But just what this will mean in practice, and how useful it will be, remains to be seen.

Outside of the public sector, MYGN and its partners appear to be the only companies pursuing this course, arguing that it will lead to the discovery of novel pathways of protein interactions. But their competitors in the proteomics space say that truly mapping the proteome is neither feasible nor useful. They prefer to tackle proteomics in bite-sized chunks in what they consider to be physiologically relevant systems...