Comment by matheusmoreira

Proteins are the molecular machines of all living beings on this planet. They do almost everything. We need to understand their structure and how that structure changes when they perform some function. Essentially we have to reverse engineer nature's machines.

Biology has traditionally studied these things from the outside in, top down. Advances in biology are correlated with advances in microscope technology. We went from seeing with the naked eye to being able to magnify tissue to see cells and even what's inside of them.

Studying biology from the inside out, bottom up is significantly harder. You have chemistry which is hard science. On top of that you have biochemistry which is equally rigorous. Above that level of abstraction things start to get a lot less well defined. We go from organic chemistry (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, etc.) to more complex things found in life (aminoacids, carbohydrates, lipids) to polymers of those things (proteins, polysaccharides, triglycerides) to a point where they get so big and complex their tridimensional structure starts influencing how they interact with other molecules then we start seeing aggregates (quaternary proteins) of these complex things!

Important proteins like ATP synthase are well understood (it's a friggin' turbine like in a hydroelectric power plant!) but there are so many others haven't received the same attention. Bioinformatics technology is changing that. The human genome's been mapped. Now it's time to map the proteome.