New Drug Discovery in the Postgenomic Era: From Genomics to Proteomics

Article Abstract

The Human Genome Project is the monumental task of mapping all the millions of DNA base pairs in tens of thousands of human genes on 24 chromosomes, known collectively as the genome. It seems that genes may constitute only 3% of this DNA. The rest of the DNA is not well understood and is sometimes called "junk DNA," although it is obviously there for reasons that will undoubtedly be clarified in the future. Nearly complete, the Human Genome Project may in some ways be obsolete before it is even finished because the complete picture of a cell is actually determined by the proteins expressed by these genes at any one time. The complete list, an amino acid sequence, of all the cell’s proteins is call the proteome.