Grant: China-Canada Joint Health Research Initiative

The human liver is key to our understanding of human physiology. The liver is the major site of energy storage in the body via sugar stored as glycogen. It is the organ positioned anatomically to receive directly the blood supply from the insulin and glucogen producing cells from islets of Langerhans of the pancreas which regulate the storage and breakdown of glycogen in the liver. Liver is also the major site of drug detoxification in the human body and this same machinery regulates cholesterol formation and its elimination from the body. One major cell type accounts for 90% of liver, the hepatocyte which secretes most proteins into the bloodstream. The other cell types are important in nutrient uptake and the delivery of the plasma proteins from the liver to the circulation. In addition, important immune cells are found between the blood and the hepatocytes. Clearly, the make up of the protein complement of liver is important for understanding liver function in health and what goes wrong in liver diseases including cirrhosis, hepatitis and liver cancer. The objective of this grant is to transform the data amassed by several hundred Chinese investigators in 11 labs and assign the data quantitatively to a new gene-based protein coding data base using tools developed in Montreal, as well as to assign proteins to intracellular structures (organelles) in liver cells in order to decipher the abundance location and function of all proteins made in human liver and reveal the diagnostic proteins of cancer.