Table 1. Proportion of characterized proteins in the S.cerevisiae and C.elegans proteomes.

	S.cerevisiae	C.elegans
Total number of known and predicted proteins	6122	18 988
Proteins characterized by genetics or biochemistry	3199 (52% of total)	1133 (6% of total)
Proteins known by similarity to characterized proteins	975 (16% of total)	12 638 (67% of total)
Proteins of unknown function	1948 (32% of total)	5217 (27% of total)

These statistics are as of September 1999. For links to current statistics, see Supplementary Material.