When biomedical research is mentioned, we still tend to think in terms of people in white lab coats squinting into microscopes. But biotechnology today, particularly in the exploding genomics field, has at least as much to do with constructing algorithms, designing databases, and running search engines as it does with wet work in the lab. Sequencing the rice genome took 80-odd machines, a staff of 200, and heavy investment from Monsanto Corporation, and Gregory Mahairas' rice group is just one of the local teams hacking its way through the genetic jungle. A genetic sequence isn't much use until someone's gone over it looking for the occasional meaningful sentence lost among the babble of nonsense syllables. Trying to figure out what's wrong with an organism with nothing but the sequence of its genes to work with is like trying to look up something in an encyclopedia that hasn't been alphabetized.
Proteins are the primary functional units of every cell.
Every gene codes for just one protein. So if we could somehow catalog all the proteins present in a cell at any one time, we would also know which genes were currently switched on and producing them. And if we could repeat the cataloging process at various stages in a cell's life cycle often enough, we would have a kind of biochemical freeze-frame motion picture of the particular vital process we're interested in. No wonder PE Biosystems wanted a piece of Aebersold's action. PE is the hardware arm of the biotech empire founded by Craig Venter , the scientist-entrepreneur who last month claimed to have sequenced the entire human genome.