Coolproteomics.com|It’s all about proteins, isn’t it?

Have you ever spent time in a crowded city on a busy street corner just watching? Watching people?

Close your eyes and see it in your mind. You’re at the corner of Fifth and Park Avenues in New York City… it’s the summer and it just rained. You have to meet someone for dinner so you call to get directions and exchange information. On the way out of the office you smoke a joint, buy flowers from a vendor, bump into someone who quietly pick-pockets your wallet while you give some money to a street artist… and you continue to watch the people around you. Some of them are more attractive then others, you think to yourself, and then one comes along and you hug tightly… you can feel the chemistry.

Now, think about a cell… go deep inside and make yourself tiny. Really tiny. Can you see the different macromolecules floating around, some hurrying to get somewhere… some hanging with the wrong crowd, free radicals, roaming proteases, foreign small molecules, substrates. And then a few bump into each other and hang out for a while, while others avoid each other with a vengeance. You watch as one decent sized multivalent protein leans against the cell membrane and rings the doorbell. A giant vacuole pops open and with its lipid lips swallows it whole. Shock is in the air. Most of the proteins seem to know where they’re going, but some just hang around like they’re waiting for a bus.

They are born, one amino acid at a time. They fold, unfold, perform a function and then die… chopped up by another protein like a mortician preparing a body.

And life goes on.

That’s what we’re up against in studying proteins and the world around them… some order, a lot of chaos, and the criminal element always there to screw things up.

So when we think about the huge efforts being made by researchers to unravel this complex matrix and attempt to solve problems, it’s a wonder we are making any progress at all. We tend to view proteins and DNA, membranes and the cell as discrete objects doing their thing when in reality it’s one giant blob —heck even our system biology approach is overly simplistic. But at this point, in these early days (trust me, we are early!) of proteomics we have no choice. We have to take it one step at a time and attempt, with good technologies and well thought through experiments, to make some sense of it.

If we look at just one criminal (or is he more aptly named a terrorist?) running rampant —cancer— we need a different approach. A Manhattan project. One company, one institution can’t cut it. This isn’t about competition, it’s about something much more important. I think we forget that sometimes.

Proteins, like people running around doing their thing, want to live their lives free of stress. They don’t want to worry about bad guys lurching around the next corner. But who will provide this security; this peaceful existence? The life sciences community. Scientific researchers are security forces who provide protection. They are the protein police.

So let’s circle our wagons, together, worldwide, and agree on the mission. It’s fighting the real terrorists… disease.