Proteomics tools for medical researches

Abstract

Proteomics has been used for the systematic study of proteins in a cell e.g. protein expression.  Proteomic analysis is a highly sensitive method which can be used for the detection of a very small amount of protein sample with detection limit of femtomole.  Moreover, this method provides very high throughput.  At present, mass spectrometry is widely used in proteomic analysis. The mass spectrometry composes of four principal compartments including ion source, mass analyzer, ion detector, and data system. In the first compartment, ion source, electrospray ionization (ESI) and matrix assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) are ion generators. The second compartment, mass analyzer, is used for an analysis of mass to charge ratio. The third compartment is an ion detector.  The last compartment, data system, is the work station for data processing and analysis with computerized system that can be linked to several kinds of database for example NCBI homepage (http://www.ncbi.mlm.nih.gov/), Expasy proteomics tools (http://www.expasy.ch/tools) and etc. Several applications of proteomic analysis have been implemented in protein study such as typing peptide mass fingerprints (PMF), detecting bio-markers and performing MALDI–Tissue Imaging, etc. Taken together, proteomics is the promising method that can be applied for medical sciences in many aspects.