Gene Centric Approach

The principle of gene-centric view has been proposed by the Canadian scientist, John Bergeron. Results of protein identifications comprising the proteome should be imposed on a genome as the general base. The consideration of the human proteome in intricate connection to the genome is a crucial principle of the gene-centric approach. One of the end-points of the project will be met so long as at least one protein for each gene will be identified with high validity.

Nowadays, less than 8000 proteins were identified for more than 20000 genes. Despite the fact that in last ten years approximately 10 billion of different protein identifications were performed by proteomics community, more than one half of genes with predicted protein products have no evidence for such product. One of possible explanation of this discrepancy is a principal limitation of current analytical methods in proteomics (See “The Reverse Avogadro Number”).

The gene-centric principle allows the distribution of the Human Proteome Project activities between the countries based on the chromosomes, as it was done in scope of the Human Genome Project.