It is generally believed that full human genome sequencing was a watershed event in human history that boosted biomedical research, biomolecular mechanism discovery and life science applications. At the same time, researchers in the field of genome annotation see that there is a persisting, substantial body of functionally insufficiently or completely not characterized genes (for example, ~10,000 protein-coding in the human genome) despite the availability of full genome sequences. A survey of the biomedical literature shows that the number of reported new protein functions had been steadily growing until 2000 but the trend reversed to a dramatic decline thereafter (1,2). The fastest growing set of genes in the last decade is that with 500 or more full publication equivalents, i.e., the genes that are well characterized anyhow. At the same time, the annual amount of life science publications doubled between 2000 and 2017. There are no apparent scientific or financial reasons for the decline in biomolecular mechanism discovery; probably, current instruments of science funding do not direct or even discourage researchers to go after the difficult problems of gene function discovery. The talk will also cover details about the role of natural organism research (3) and medical patient databases (4) in biomolecular mechanism discovery.
1) Darkness in the human gene and protein function space: Widely modest or absent illumination by the life science literature and the trend for fewer protein function discoveries since 2000. Sinha S, Eisenhaber B, Jensen LJ, Kalbuaji B, Eisenhaber F. Proteomics 2018, in press
2) A decade after the first full human genome sequencing: when will we understand our own genome? Eisenhaber F. J Bioinform Comput Biol. 2012 Oct;10(5):1271001. doi: 10.1142/S0219720012710011
3) The 160K Natural Organism Library, a unique resource for natural products research. Ng SB, Kanagasundaram Y, Fan H, Arumugam P, Eisenhaber B, Eisenhaber F. Nat Biotechnol. 2018 Jul 6;36(7):570-573. doi: 10.1038/nbt.418
4) Hypocrisy around medical patient data: issues of access for biomedical research, data quality, usefulness for the purpose and omics data as game changer. Tantoso E, Wong WC, Sinha S, Eisenhaber B, Eisenhaber F. Bioethics Asia Review 2018, submitted
