Bioinformatics Vol. 19 Suppl. 2 2003
page ii237
© 2003 Oxford University Press
The proteome and the metabolome
European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI-EMBL), Cambridge, UK
Received on March 17, 2003
; accepted on June 9, 2003
High throughput technology is having an immense impact on biological research and one of the major challenges today is to use all this information to understand the complex network of interactions in the cell. Not only have we seen an exponential growth in genomic sequence data, but with the advent of transcriptome and proteome technologies—in combination with structural genomics and combinatorial chemistry—the flood of new data is currently overwhelming and will only increase. In biology the sequence and structure databases (to say nothing of the small molecule data) have traditionally been separate projects—certainly within the public sector. Databases for the transcriptome and proteome data are only just coming on line. Functional data has traditionally not been captured computationally, although pathway databases are now becoming increasingly important. In this presentation I will look towards future prospects in linking bioinformatics and chemoinformatics. I will describe in detail some current work at EBI on the different worlds of the ‘proteome’ and the metabolome. It is interesting to overview the full complement of small molecules in a cell and how this reflects the metabolic enzymes. The complement of metabolic enzymes in different species will be discussed and their evolution considered.
Contact: thornton{at}ebi.ac.ukhttp://www.ebi.ac.uk/Information/Staff/janet.html