Proteomics analysis techniques and Bioinformatics approaches for biomarkers discovery

Abstract

Proteomics is the study of all the proteins expressed in the proteome and offer new avenues of research in the biomedical field. The recent development of protein analysis tools has continued to improve, offering a wide range of technologies categorised according to their ability to analyse and identify protein such as MSbased technology. These novels tools have been invaluable to the rise of proteomics and permitted significant progress in the identification of clinically applicable biomarkers and new therapeutic targets although detection of very low abundance proteins remains difficult. Due to the high throughput data generated by proteomic mass spectrometric analysis, automatic biomarker identification requires bioinformatics and database screening. Bioinformatics allows the development of new algorithms and software for the interpretation of mass spectrometry data in order to facilitate the exploitation of the data and the validation of potentially discovered biomarkers. The aim of this paper was to discuss the analytical techniques used in protein biomarker discovery and the usefulness of bioinformatics for the interpretation and validation of the data generated.