Posted: Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 2:00 PM

WEDNESDAY, May 28, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- A team of international researchers has identified nearly 85 percent of proteins in the human body.

Proteins are the substances that provide structure, function and regulation of the body's tissues and organs. Human genes contain instructions (encoding) that direct the production of proteins, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

In addition to finding the majority of the body's proteins, the researchers also identified 193 new proteins on the human genome. The proteins were found in areas of DNA that were believed to be "noncoding," or regions that do not encode proteins.

Finding proteins in areas with genes that weren't believed to code means the human genome could be more complex than previously believed, the researchers concluded.

"This was the most exciting part of this study, finding further complexities in the genome. The fact that 193 of the proteins came from DNA sequences predicted to be noncoding means that we don't fully understand how cells read DNA, because clearly those sequences do code for proteins," Dr. Akhilesh Pandey, a professor at the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine and of biological chemistry, pathology and oncology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said in a news release.

More than 10 years ago, researchers identified all of the nearly 25,000 genes in human DNA. Known as the Human Genome Project, the research provided scientists with genetic information that helped them figure out how changes in certain genes could trigger some diseases.

The current researchers set out to create an initial catalog of all the proteins in the human body, or the human "proteome." The team identified proteins originating from more than 17,000 genes, which is about 84 percent of all of the genes in the human genome predicted to encode proteins.

Cataloging human proteins and where they can be found in the body may provide scientists even more insight than a catalog of all the genes in the human genome, the researchers pointed out. They explained that the characteristics of an organism depend on its genes. These genes, however, provide directions for making proteins, which are the building blocks of all cells in the body.

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Researchers Identify New Genetic Building Blocks