Proteomics, the analysis of proteins present in a cell under different conditions, has always lagged behind genomics, as a rush of technological innovations made comprehensive genome mapping dizzyingly quick and achievable even for laboratories without access to core facilities. But unlike the main goal of genomics—laying out a primarily static sequence of base pairs—proteomics, with its diversity of shape, size, and sequence, presents more problems to tackle.
“Some scientists have proposed that the complexity of the proteome is unbounded,” explains Bradford Gibson of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California, citing splice variation, phosphorylation, time-dependent changes in protein expression, turnover, and interactions as examples of what makes proteomics complicated. But for all its infinite variability, proteomics is on the cusp of a sea change in technology that will help scientists get a better grip on what’s going on in the cells they study.
Mass spectrometry, long an ...
