Proteomics

The proteome is the entire complement of proteins in an organism or cell. Proteomics is the large-scale effort to characterize and identify all of the proteins encoded in an organism’s genome, involving their post-translational changes. Increasingly, in the field of proteomics, proteins resolved through two-dimensional gel electrophoresis are subjected to trypsin digestion and the extremely accurate molecular masses of the peptides produced are used as a ‘fingerprint’ to identify the protein from databases of real or predicted tryptic peptide sizes.