The Importance of Protein Co- and Post-Translational Modifications in Proteome Projects

Abstract

Any protein in a proteome can be modified by co- and post-translational modifications. There are literally dozens of different types of such modifications, all of which can influence a protein’s charge, hydrophobicity, conformation and/or stability. Hence, the “one-gene-one-polypeptide” paradigm is now outdated as we understand that in both eukaryotes and prokaryotes the polypeptide translation of many genes is modified to create multiple gene products from a single DNA sequence (Fig. 4.1). Well-documented examples include the differential glycosylation of Thy-1 expressed in different tissues (Parekh et al. 1987) and the differential RNA splicing of N-CAM (Cunningham et al. 1987).