Marc R. Wilkins is an Australian scientist who is credited with the defining the concept of the proteome.^[1] Wilkins is a Professor in the School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Wilkins coined the term proteome in 1994 whilst developing the concept as a PhD student at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, describing it as the 'PROTein complement expressed by a genOME'.^[2] The term is a generalisation of the concept of the genome to encompass the set of all proteins that can be produced through the genome through alternative splicing and post-transcriptional modification of messenger RNA.^[3]

Career

Wilkins held a post-doctoral fellowship from 1995–1997 at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, working with Prof Denis Hochstrasser and Dr Amos Bairoch. He co-developed many of the protein analysis tools available on the ExPASy web server. He subsequently served as a senior post-doctoral fellow in the Australian Proteome Analysis Facility, which was established by the Australian Government in 1995 as the world's first dedicated proteome research centre.^[4]

In 1997 he co-edited the first book on proteomics, 'Proteome Research: New Frontiers in Functional Genomics' (Wilkins et al. (eds), Springer Verlag), which sold more than 4,000 copies.^[5]

He was a co-founder of the proteomics company Proteome Systems Ltd. It was established in January 1999, and listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in 2004. Dr Wilkins worked in Proteome Systems full-time for 6 years as leader of its bioinformatics Research and Development team then as Head of Proteomics. It was awarded IBM's "Rookie of the Year Award" for companies in the Asia-Pacific region, in 2003. Proteome Systems was renamed Tyrian Diagnostics^[6] and ultimately divested its IP. In 2007, Wilkins co-founded the regenerative medicine company, Regeneus.^[7] This company has developed treatments for osteoarthritis using adult stem cells, which are now in clinical trials.

Wilkins is currently a Professor of Systems Biology at the University of New South Wales,^[8] and is the director of the Systems Biology Initiative^[9] and the Ramaciotti Centre for Genomics.^[10] He has published more than 200 research papers and book chapters.^[11] His current research concerns the role of protein methylation in the eukaryotic cell, the use of crosslinking mass spectrometry (XL-MS) for proteome-scale analysis of protein interaction networks (the interactome) and the bioinformatic analysis of next-generation sequencing data. As part of the koala genome consortium, his team did all PacBio long-read sequencing and then Falcon-based assembly to generate the most complete and contiguous marsupial genome to date.^[12]

In 2012, Wilkins was awarded the Australian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology's Beckman Coulter Discovery Science Award.^[13] This prize is awarded to a member for distinguished contributions to the field of biochemistry and molecular biology. The University of New South Wales awarded Wilkins a Doctor of Science (D. Sc.) in 2018.

Recently, he has enjoyed collaborating on the Human Proteome Project (published 2020) and the Human RNA Atlas Project (published 2021).

References

External links

• Marc Wilkins Biography - University of New South Wales
• School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences University of New South Wales
• Carol Ezzell, "Proteins Rule", Scientific American (April 2002).
• The Australian Proteome Analysis Facility (APAF Ltd)
• Tyrian Diagnostics (formerly Proteome Systems Ltd, up to 6 November 2008)
• Systems Biology Initiative
• ASBMB Awards descriptions