Is a species' genome bigger smaller or equal to its proteome?

[Chelsea]

Thank you peter can u look at my palindrome question please

[Adam Gunning]

Proteome is bigger as many genes can go through alternative splicing, which results in two (or more) different proteins transcribed from a single gene.

[Peter S]

Proteome is bigger than the genome in eukaryotes since there are more protein types then genes.

[mmorgan]

This is a bit of a tricky question because the units of the genome are less well defined than that of the proteome.

One could define the proteome as all of the unique proteins expressed by a cell.

A simple definition of the genome could be all all of the regions of DNA that are expressed as RNA. This would include protein coding genes, as well as non-coding RNA (ribosomal RNA, tRNA, miRNA, lncRNA etc.).

If you use these definitions, I still don't know if you would be able to answer the question accurately because:
A. It's very difficult to characterize the whole proteome and
B. All of the transcribed genes have not yet been identified

Also things get much more tricky if you consider the complexity of the genome. Some genes have multiple promoters and produce different proteins. Do you consider that 1 gene or 2 genes, and on what basis do you make that judgement. Also there are silent viral genes throughout the mammalian genome that have the potential to become active. So are these included in the count of genes.