title: Comparative ranking of human chromosomes based on post-genomic data.
abstract: The goal of the Human Proteome Project (HPP) is to fully characterize the 21,000 human protein-coding genes with respect to the estimated two million proteins they encode. As such, the HPP aims to create a comprehensive, detailed resource to help elucidate protein functions and to advance medical treatment. Similarly to the Human Genome Project (HGP), the HPP chose a chromosome-centric approach, assigning different chromosomes to different countries. Here we introduce a scoring method for chromosome ranking based on several characteristics, including relevance to health problems, existing published knowledge, and current transcriptome and proteome coverage. The score of each chromosome was computed as a weighted combination of indexes reflecting the aforementioned characteristics. The approach is tailored to the chromosome-centric HPP (C-HPP), and is advantageous in that it takes into account currently available information. We ranked the human chromosomes using the proposed score, and observed that Chr Y, Chr 13, and Chr 18 were top-ranked, whereas the scores of Chr 19, Chr 11, and Chr 17 were comparatively low. For Chr 18, selected for the Russian part of C-HPP, about 25% of the encoded genes were associated with diseases, including cancers and neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases, as well as type 1 diabetes and essential hypertension. This ranking approach could easily be adapted to prioritize research for other sets of genes, such as metabolic pathways and functional categories.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Biomedical Chemistry of Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Moscow, Russia.
authors.forename: Elena
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Ponomarenko
authors.forename: Ekaterina
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Poverennaya
authors.forename: Mikhail
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pyatnitskiy
authors.forename: Andrey
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lisitsa
authors.forename: Sergei
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Moshkovskii
authors.forename: Ekaterina
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Ilgisonis
authors.forename: Alexey
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chernobrovkin
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Archakov
mesh_terms: D002874:Chromosome Mapping; D002877:Chromosomes, Human; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D023281:Genomics; D016045:Human Genome Project; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D016366:Open Reading Frames