This initiative is getting a ton of press and raises some interesting questions (in my head, at least!). Depending on who you ask and where you draw the lines of "what is a different cell" there are something between hundreds and thousands(!!!) of different cell types in a human body (lets ignore our microbiomes where we're probably looking at orders of magnitude more, LOL!)
The idea is that a bunch of smart genomics researchers need to make some lines -- "this is this cell" and so on -- and then map the crap out of them!
The interesting question in my mind then is this --- if we had maps like this -- should we be using them in proteomics? We know the more specific the database is the better our results turn out -- so, for example, if I am doing an analysis of PTMs on glial cells -- should I be using a FASTA generated only from glial cells?
Searches would be faster and you'd think the FDR would be better(?), but you are placing a lot of trust in the people who originally isolated those glial cells in both the genome and your study as well as in the FASTA annotations. I can't wait until I have the option, though! Get sequencing!
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