Potential Applications and Limitations of Proteomics in the Study of Neurological Disease

Proteomics represents the comprehensive study of cellular proteins and is aimed at analyzing their structure, function, expression, interactions, and localization in complex biological systems. The information obtained from these types of analyses can contribute to our understanding of the function of individual proteins by identifying protein x protein interactions and dynamic protein networks found in normal and diseased conditions. Genomic (DNA) or transcriptomic (messenger RNA) approaches alone do not take into account changes in protein stability, localization, and posttranslational modifications that are often critical determinants of protein function and, by extension, cellular behavior. Although proteomic methods still require significant technical advances to provide a truly "global" or "comprehensive" measure of gene expression similar to that achieved by DNA microarrays, recent advances in proteomics are beginning to provide a means to simultaneously characterize the expression of thousands of proteins in a whole cell or biofluid proteome and hundreds of proteins in select subcellular structures or protein complexes. The information obtained from these studies should promote a better understanding of disease conditions, help therapeutic decision making, and potentially foster the identification of therapeutic targets by comparing the proteomes of normal and diseased samples.