Proteomics

Proteomics is one of the recent development in biosciences. The name was coined by Marc Wilkins 1994, Australia, during his PhD, long time before the resources required had been made available.
After several up and downs and with the development of databases, software and instrumentation, Proteomics becomes a mature technique to be applied on concrete questions in biology, medicine, drug discovery, drug development and many more fields.
In combination with the increasing
number of sequenced genomes from eukaryotes and many more organisms Proteomics allows to follow changes in the protein level caused by external or internal triggers. For human this leads to the understanding of diseases and to the development of treatments.
The approach to identify proteins in complex samples in an unbiased way is called shotgun Proteomics.
The state-of-the-art today is that Proteomics has become a high-throughput technique, identifying and quantifying thousands of proteins in one sample, as a plasma sample.
Protein sequence based information overcome the major drawbacks of detection by antibodies, the crossreactivity and limited quantification.
More important, mass spectrometry based protein detection and quantification in complex samples is multiplexed, many, up to several thousands, proteins can be detected in on analytical analysis.
In the last years,
targeted Proteomics has become a major tool for detection and quantification of defined proteins in a sample. Based on the known sequence, the mass spectrometer looks for the intact molecule, then fragments it and then looks for define fragments. Only is the intact molecule, the precursor, and the defined fragment come together, a signal is recorded. From a dried bloodspot more than 80 proteins have been analysed using this approach.

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