Discovery of the Human Proteome

It has been more than a decade since the human genome was declared decoded. Since that time it has become clear that knowing the DNA only tells half of the story: Genes do provide the script, but the actors on the stage of life are the proteins. They execute the vast majority of biological processes in an organism. Yet it has been unclear for a long time which human genes actually encode proteins. In this presentation we will describe the generation of the first draft of the human proteome with more than 18,000 mapped proteins and how this information can be utilized to understand the flow of biological information from genes to functions, how proteins work together, and how drugs act on the complex protein networks regulating the life of cells.