Comparison To Proteomics
The human genome contains on the order of 25,000 genes which work in concert to produce on the order of 1,000,000 distinct proteins. This is due to alternative splicing, and also because cells make important changes to proteins through posttranslational modification after they first construct them, so a given gene serves as the basis for many possible versions of a particular protein. In any case, a single mass spectrometry experiment can identify about 2,000 proteins or 0.2% of the total. While knowledge of the precise proteins a cell makes (proteomics) is more relevant than knowing how much messenger RNA is made from each gene, gene expression profiling provides the most global picture possible in a single experiment.
Read more about this topic: Gene Expression Profiling
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