Ezkurdia Iakes, Vázquez Jesús, Valencia Alfonso, Tress Michael
‡Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), Melchor Fernandez Almagro, 3, Madrid 28029, Spain.
J Proteome Res. 2014 Aug 1;13(8):3854-5. doi: 10.1021/pr500572z. Epub 2014 Jul 16.
This letter analyzes two large-scale proteomics studies published in the same issue of Nature. At the time of the release, both studies were portrayed as draft maps of the human proteome and great advances in the field. As with the initial publication of the human genome, these papers have broad appeal and will no doubt lead to a great deal of further analysis by the scientific community. However, we were intrigued by the number of protein-coding genes detected by the two studies, numbers that far exceeded what has been reported for the multinational Human Proteome Project effort. We carried out a simple quality test on the data using the olfactory receptor family. A high-quality proteomics experiment that does not specifically analyze nasal tissues should not expect to detect many peptides for olfactory receptors. Neither of the studies carried out experiments on nasal tissues, yet we found peptide evidence for more than 100 olfactory receptors in the two studies. These results suggest that the two studies are substantially overestimating the number of protein coding genes they identify. We conclude that the experimental data from these two studies should be used with caution.
这封信分析了发表在同一期《自然》杂志上的两项大规模蛋白质组学研究。在发布之时，这两项研究都被描绘为人类蛋白质组的草图以及该领域的重大进展。与人类基因组的首次发表一样，这些论文具有广泛的吸引力，无疑将引发科学界大量的进一步分析。然而，我们对这两项研究检测到的蛋白质编码基因数量感到好奇，这些数量远远超过了多国人类蛋白质组计划所报告的数量。我们使用嗅觉受体家族对数据进行了一项简单的质量测试。一个高质量的蛋白质组学实验，如果没有专门分析鼻组织，不应期望检测到许多嗅觉受体的肽段。这两项研究都没有对鼻组织进行实验，但我们在这两项研究中发现了100多种嗅觉受体的肽段证据。这些结果表明，这两项研究在很大程度上高估了它们所鉴定的蛋白质编码基因的数量。我们得出结论，来自这两项研究的实验数据应谨慎使用。
