Project Overview

Development of a Proteoform Viewer for Peptidome Analysis

With the new era of personalised medicine underway further research and tools are needed to understand human biological function. The Human Genome Project (HGP) revealed 20,300 genes rather than the estimated 100,000 suggesting that a large amount of our biological complexity and phenotypic variation is due to protein variations (1-2). It is because of this it has been proposed to define the human proteome. This aims to define proteoforms (highly variable protein molecules that are the product of individual genes) produced from the genes discovered in HGP to provide a fundamental understanding of biological systems that is unachievable without sufficient knowledge of the human proteoform (3). The Human Proteoform Project (HPP) has been introduced with the aim of developing new technologies for proteoform analysis of which there are few. My master’s research project aims to contribute to the Human Proteoform Project through the development of a proteoform viewer for peptidome analysis.

Reference

1. Shendure J, Findlay GM, Snyder MW. Genomic Medicine–Progress, Pitfalls, and Promise. Cell. 2019 Mar;177(1):45–57.

2. Smith LM, Kelleher NL. Proteoform: a single term describing protein complexity. Nature Methods. 2013 Feb 27;10(3):186–7.

3. Smith LM, Agar JN, Chamot-Rooke J, Danis PO, Ge Y, Loo JA, et al. The Human Proteoform Project: Defining the human proteome. Science Advances. 2021 Nov 12;7(46).