Your DNA Isn’t the Whole Story
Your genes are the recipe book. Your proteins are what is actually cooking.
Almost every cell in your body carries the same DNA. A skin cell, a liver cell and a neuron all hold the same set of instructions. Yet they look and behave completely differently. The difference lies in which instructions each cell actually uses, and the result of that is its proteins.
From Gene to Protein
A gene is a stretch of DNA that holds the instructions for making a protein. When a cell needs that protein, it copies the gene into a messenger molecule called RNA, and the cell’s machinery reads the RNA to build the protein, one amino acid at a time.
Proteins do almost all the work in our bodies. They carry oxygen, digest food, fight infection, contract muscles, clot blood and pass signals between cells. If DNA is the recipe book, proteins are the meals on the table.
Why DNA Alone Can’t Tell You Everything
Same genes, different proteins: humans have roughly 20,000 protein-coding genes, but each gene can be read in different ways, so one gene can produce several versions of a protein.
Proteins get modified: after a protein is made, it can be chemically altered, for example by adding sugars or phosphate groups, or damaged by oxidation. These changes can switch a protein on or off, or change what it does.
Proteins change by the hour: your DNA is the same today as it was when you were born. Your proteins respond to what you ate, how you slept, whether you are fighting an infection and which medicines you take.
Having a gene isn’t the same as using it: a gene variant tells you what could happen. Protein levels tell you what is happening.
Where Proteomics Comes In
Proteomics is the large-scale study of proteins: identifying which ones are present in a sample, how much of each there is, and how they have been modified. It complements genetics rather than replacing it. Genetics can point to a risk; proteomics shows what the body is doing about it right now.
That is why so much of our work looks at blood plasma, tissue and cells under different conditions. In our long COVID research, for example, standard blood tests often looked normal, but the proteins trapped inside microclots told a very different story.
If you’d like to go a step further, read What Is Proteomics? and What Is LCMS?, the technology that makes it all possible.