Sir

Your Briefing on proteomics was valuable and informative. Unfortunately, the Opinion (Nature 402, 703; 1999) was less so. The writer notes that “Nature intends to play its part by insisting on conceptual insights from among the great quantities of information that [proteomics studies] will certainly deliver”.

I disagree with requiring such standards for studies of proteins when very different standards appear to be applied to sequencing studies. For example, the same issue contained two articles describing the sequencing of chromosomes 2 and 4 from Arabidopsis thaliana. As a researcher from outside the plant field, I did not find conceptual insights in this information. The speculations regarding mitochondrial gene exchange and relative proportions of receptor-signalling proteins were interesting, but were similar to speculations that would arise out of most proteomics studies where specific subsets of proteins would be identified for particular cell types.

This is not to say that I think publishing genomic sequencing milestones in Nature is inappropriate. Rather, I think you should publish both sequencing and proteomics studies, and apply similar standards for evaluating them. I find it likely that proteomics studies will contain inherently more conceptual insights, since the proteomics will be able to use the genomic sequencing information to make correlations between expression patterns and promoter and other sequence information.