Hello, I have a question about the semantics of different possible versions of proteins. In mice, a particular protein will have a given amino acid sequence, so when I talk about say Il-10 in C57/Bl6 mice it's referring to a specific primary structure.
My confusion is about the human correlate of this - different alleles of a gene can code for different versions of a protein with slightly different amino acid sequences. So when people refer to Il-10 (or another protein) in humans either on Wikipedia or clinical studies, what version of the protein are they talking about? Are they talking about the most common (wild-type) version of the protein or just all major polymorphisms assuming they don't differ much in function (as say APOE versions would)? You can look up a human protein on UniProt and it'll give you the amino acid length, where it's phosphorylated etc but is this for a particular version of the protein coded by a certain allele, or is this describing all variants of a given protein?
I guess more specifically, how can a study describe the structure of a given human protein (amino acid sequence, secondary structure etc.) if these proteins can exist as different versions through different alleles in a population?
I hope that makes sense - thanks in advance!