A Central Resource for Platelet Proteomics

An impressive but bewildering array of data are now available, at the touch of a button, for every gene and protein in the human body. This information is the harvest of the so-called “omics” technologies, which began with the human genome sequencing project and gained from subsequent efforts to characterize the transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome of individual cell types. Those coming from the perspective of vascular biology, however, might ask how does one begin to use this information to gain deeper insights into disease? In this issue of Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology , Dittrich and coworkers describe a database, PlateletWeb, that goes some way toward meeting that need.See accompanying article on page 1326 In the last 5 years, our baseline knowledge of the core components of human platelets has expanded considerably. Several key studies have described the mRNA species found in platelets.1–4 Because the proteome …