At the center of this effort are two-dimensional gels (2-D gels). When some 20 years ago, Patrick O'Farrell described the first 2-D gel system (P. H. O'Farrell, Journal of Biological Chemistry, 250(10):4007-21, 1975), he predicted that with this technology it should be possible to resolve 5,000 protein species on a single gel. He wasn't far off. Today, a gel with thousands of spots is considered routine, with claims in the literature of separations of close to 10,000 species (J. Klose and U. Kobalz, Electrophoresis, 16:1034-59, 1995). Using 2-D gels in their various emanations, the proteomes, or rather partial proteomes from close to 20 organisms and a myriad of tissues--some rather exotic such as newborn ear--have been cataloged and can be displayed
The year 1975 was an important year in the science of proteomics--of course back then no one was talking about proteomics; the focus was on improving the resolution of ...
