5 Proteomic Techniques and Their Applications
Hsueh‐Fen Juan
Department of Life Science, Graduate Institute of Biomedical Electronics and Bioinformatics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
5.1 Significance and Background
‘Proteome’ was first coined by Marc Wilkins and Keith L. Williams in 1994 in the first Siena meeting on ‘2D Electrophoresis: from protein maps to genomes’ [1] and defined in 1996 as ‘the entire proteins in a cell, a tissue or an organism’ [2]. The term, proteome, was not adopted immediately because the genomics researchers preferred to call the study of proteome as functional genomics. In ‘A Sydney proteome story’, Williams talked about proteins as ‘functional genomes’, but that did not really work for us, so we stayed with the name ‘proteome’ [3]. One year later, the term ‘proteomics’ was coined as the study of proteome, including protein identification, protein modification and protein–protein interaction (PPI). Proteins are functional molecules and the workhorses of the cell [3], and hence profiling proteome helps us to understand cellular processes.
In the 1980s, researchers used Edman sequencing to obtain protein sequence information for the abundant proteins after applying two‐dimension gel electrophoresis (2DE) to separate proteins by size and charge. Edman sequencing was a laborious process, however, and new techniques were sought. In the 1990s, genome sequencing techniques were improved dramatically, and genome databases were built ...