Herd this story ?

 I shall be telling this with a sigh
 Somewhere ages and ages hence:
 Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
 I took the one less traveled by,
 And that has made all the difference. -By Robert Frost

This excerpt from the poem “The road not taken’ by Robert Frost aptly captures the message conveyed in this post. The ‘herd instinct’ is probably natural to humans and linked evoutionarily to animal psyche. Animals use it to reduce danger for themselves by moving together. It is an interesting observation that when panic-stricken individuals were confined to a room with two equal and equidistant exits, majority favoured one exit over the other. Similar behaviour is seen in stock markets with bursts of frenzied buying and selling. This natural tendency is also extended to research. Interestingly, it was shown that more than 75% of protein research still focuses on the 10% of proteins that were known before the genome was mapped. Using publication trends as a measure to identify the pattern of change, a study¹ was done in 3 classes of proteins: kinases, ion channels and nuclear receptors, and it was found that not much has changed over the past 20 years. Although emerging technologies makes possible analysis of large number of genes and proteins in one pass and many proteins have been uncovered from obscurity, scientists still seem to show preference for a select few ‘favourites’ to dig deeper, rather than explore newer horizons. Projects like the chromosome-centric human proteome project (C-HPP) by Human Proteome Organization (HUPO)², were created to remove this research bias and bring the lesser known proteins into the limelight. Apart from the herd ‘risk free’ instinct, this propensity could also be fuelled by conservative funding from government and non-government agencies alike and also by the lack of available tools and resources like antibodies and assays to explore unchartered territories. Instead, scientists would rather focus on research that is likely to generate quick and sure shot results.  In future, research on the lesser known proteins will depend to a large extent on the availability of proper research tools. However, given the challenges, scientists should still be encouraged to choose less explored paths and who knows, ages and ages down the road something significant will come out and we will be telling those stories to our kids. 🙂

References:

1.     Edwards, A. M.; Isserlin, R.; Bader, G. D.; Frye, S. V.; Willson, T. M.; Yu, F. H., Too many roads not taken. Nature 2011, 470, (7333), 163-5.

2.      Huhmer, A. F.; Paulus, A.; Martin, L. B.; Millis, K.; Agreste, T.; Saba, J.; Lill, J. R.; Fischer, S. M.; Dracup, W.; Lavery, P., The chromosome-centric human proteome project: a call to action. J Proteome Res 2013, 12, (1), 28-32.