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Comment by divbzero | Hacker News Reader

Don’t we have an advantage in studying RNA (or “junk” DNA) over proteins in that sequencing of nucleic acids is far easier than sequencing of proteins? Seems fortuitous for our research efforts that these nucleic acids play a bigger role in biology than we initially thought.

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You’re correct that sequencing RNA/DNA is currently much cheaper and easier than directly sequencing proteins in a cell.

But, knowing the sequence of a biomolecule is only a first step in understanding it’s function. By-and-large, we’ve had significantly more progress in describing functional domains (and therefore tying them to important biological processes) in proteins than we have in RNA.

Sequencing nucleic acids (RNA, DNA) is more straightforward, though protein sequencing tech is fairly functional too, if more expensive and complicated, machinery wise.

There are some recent startups (Glyphic Bio out of MIT, and Jonathan Rothberg's Quantum-Si) that are tackling next-gen protein sequencing. I'm eager to see what they can do once they're widely available.

I’m particularly excited about nanopore protein sequencing. I don’t think there are any startups yet but the technology is commercially available for DNA sequencing.

There’s some very recent progress in the area!

“Multiple rereads of single proteins at single–amino acid resolution using nanopores”: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl4381

(Unfortunately paywalled, but the senior author explained the paper in a Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/cees_dekker/status/1456323490647212033)

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