LAUSR

Three studies in our Cell Systems Call report new surveys of the proteome. They uncover an additional ∼400 proteins associated with ribosomes, nearly 50,000 new human protein-protein interactions, and ∼4,600 human protein complexes. In an article in this issue, Olsen and colleagues (pp. 587–599) describe an optimized proteomics workflow that enabled them to catalog the proteome of HeLa cells more comprehensively than before (see also Ly and Lamond, pp. 581–582). As these and other studies are published, can we systematically evaluate their contribution to the global body of research knowledge? Would it be fruitful to develop new metrics to help place a study in the context of prior literature?At Cell Systems, we find these sorts of questions fascinating, and eagerly await the discovery (and publication in these pages, hopefully!) of the next generation of biological measurement metrics. New assays for measuring new aspects of biological systems will surely be developed. But to fully harness these measurements, what’s needed are metrics to analyze these data that lead to fundamental insights and understanding—metrics that matter.