The goal of the Human Proteome Project (HPP) is to fully characterize the 21,000 
human protein-coding genes with respect to the estimated two million proteins 
they encode. As such, the HPP aims to create a comprehensive, detailed resource 
to help elucidate protein functions and to advance medical treatment. Similarly 
to the Human Genome Project (HGP), the HPP chose a chromosome-centric approach, 
assigning different chromosomes to different countries. Here we introduce a 
scoring method for chromosome ranking based on several characteristics, 
including relevance to health problems, existing published knowledge, and 
current transcriptome and proteome coverage. The score of each chromosome was 
computed as a weighted combination of indexes reflecting the aforementioned 
characteristics. The approach is tailored to the chromosome-centric HPP (C-HPP), 
and is advantageous in that it takes into account currently available 
information. We ranked the human chromosomes using the proposed score, and 
observed that Chr Y, Chr 13, and Chr 18 were top-ranked, whereas the scores of 
Chr 19, Chr 11, and Chr 17 were comparatively low. For Chr 18, selected for the 
Russian part of C-HPP, about 25% of the encoded genes were associated with 
diseases, including cancers and neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases, as 
well as type 1 diabetes and essential hypertension. This ranking approach could 
easily be adapted to prioritize research for other sets of genes, such as 
metabolic pathways and functional categories.