Among proteomics techniques, protein microarrays may be getting a lot of buzz these days, but two-dimensional gels still do most of the work. That's because protein arrays present a number of technical challenges that have limited their implementation.1 Proteins vary wildly in stability, solubility, viscosity, and ease of synthesis, for instance. And, the in vitro translated proteins generally used to construct protein biochips often lack the wide diversity of co- and post-translational modifications that can affect protein activity in vivo.
But protein arrays aren't dead in the water. Recently, Andrew Gooley, chief scientific officer at Proteome Systems, New South Wales, Australia, and colleagues asserted that the product of two-dimensional gel electrophoresis is basically a protein array.2 The difference between such an array and traditional microarrays, the authors explained in their manuscript, is that each protein's position is defined not by the user, but by its isoelectric point and molecular weight.
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