The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans and the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster (pictured, right) produce similar relative amounts of analogous proteins, even though levels of the messenger RNAs that code for these proteins vary widely between the species.
Michael Hengartner at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and his colleagues used mass spectrometry to analyse almost 11,000 C. elegans proteins (roughly half of the worm's predicted gene products). Of these, they selected nearly 2,700 for which mRNA data were available and compared their abundances with those of related proteins in the fruitfly. Protein ratios in the two model organisms correlated highly despite the two species' 600 million years of separate evolution, illustrating that regulating protein abundance is more important than maintaining gene-expression levels.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Proteomics: Worm versus fly. Nature 458, 128 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/458128c
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/458128c
