The human proteome size as a technological development function

Changes in information on the number of human proteoforms, post-translational modification (PTM) events, alternative splicing (AS), single-amino acid polymorphisms (SAP) associated with protein-coding genes in the neXtProt database have been retrospectively analyzed. In 2016, our group proposed three mathematical models for predicting the number of different proteins (proteoforms) in the human proteome. Eight years later, we compared the original data of the information resources and their contribution to the prediction results, correlating the differences with new approaches to experimental and bioinformatic analysis of protein modifications. The aim of this work is to update information on the status of records in the databases of identified proteoforms since 2016, as well as to identify trends in changes in the quantities of these records. According to various information models, modern experimental methods may identify from 5 to 125 million different proteoforms: the proteins formed due to alternative splicing, the implementation of single nucleotide polymorphisms at the proteomic level, and post-translational modifications in various combinations. This result reflects an increase in the size of the human proteome by 20 or more times over the past 8 years.