For the first time in the world, a group of Indian scientists working in Bangalore, along with their American counterparts, have mapped more than 17,000 proteins in 30 organs of the human body. Just like the human genome was sequenced around the turn of the millennium, this is an equivalent mapping of the human proteome.
The work, done by scientists of the Institute of Bioinformatics, National Institute of Mental Health and NeuroSciences (Nimhans), Bangalore and Johns Hopkins University.
The discovery is important as it will open the doors to finding the root causes of many diseases. “We have the profile of normal proteins. We could get profiles of proteins of a person diagnosed with a particular condition. By comparing, we can know what went wrong. This could be a phenomenal step in medicine,” said Keshava Prasad, scientist at the Institute of Bioinformatics.
It’s estimated there are around 20,500 proteins in the human body. These scientists have profiled around 17,294, which account for around 84% of the total proteins.
