FUNTIONAL GENOMICS: GENOMES AT WORK - Page 3

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Mar 11, 2003

Does this give you an idea of the work ahead?

Fortunately because of the HGP scientists made a great advance around 1996. The DNA chips. With them, they were able to examine whole genomes at once and study the frequency of gene variants in different tissues and patients.

Using chips, they soon were able to detect the transcription products of those tissues. In other words they were able to see the first phase of gene expression, transcription, the synthesizing of RNA. And also observe how that expression changed according to the needs of the experiments the scientists were conducting. From here a new science was born: Transcritptonomics. The study of the transcription patterns of different tissues on different conditions.

However the workhorses of the cell are the proteins, thus we have to go to another new science Proteonomics. It is based on the same principle of 2-D chromatography, although new exiting technological developments are underway, in order to speed the work. Researchers are in the process of identifying the protein signatures of healthy and diseased tissue. Or see how those signatures change under different conditions. By the way, ; the term Proteome was coined in the mid-90´s by Mark Wilkins an Australian postdoctoral fellow, to refer to all the proteins expressed in a given cell at one particular moment

As you can imagine, the amount of data coming out of genomics, transcriptonomics and proteonomics is staggering, thus the need of faster computers with the appropriate software to analyze such data is enormous. From these realities and needs another science has been born: Bioinformatics. There are very few people trained in such field, so if you are looking for a career, that is the one.

From the results of Proteonomics, they expect to find proteins that could be targets for the new wonderful drugs promised by the HGP and which are part of another new science Pharmacogenomics, about which I already wrote an article, but I feel that it is time to revisit

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