To do this one has to understand their structure.
"It's the proteins that go bad and cause disease," he said. "All modern pharmaceuticals act at level of protein. None of that info is there in the book of life if you will."
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In the next few years researchers will try to solve the three dimensional structures of as many proteins as possible.
Although much remains to be done, researchers agree that the completion of the sequence is a major achievement.
"It's very exciting stuff," said MacBeath. "Philosophically this is the first time in human history where we have the complete set of info that encodes a human being."