The process of creating protein oligomers, compounds composed of a small number, usually between three and ten, of identical component monomers. Oligomers may be formed by the polymerization of a number of monomers or the depolymerization of a large protein polymer.
A reference proteome is a set of protein sequences derived from a complete proteome which constitutes a defined standard for a particular user community. Reference proteomes are manually defined according to a number of criteria. They cover the proteomes of well- studied model organisms and other proteomes of interest for biomedical and biotechnological research. Reference proteomes have been selected to provide broad coverage of the tree of life, and constitute a representative cross-section of the taxonomic diversity to be found within UniProtKB.