Proteomics in Systems Biology

Proteomics is the study of proteins, the workhorses of cells. Proteins can be subjected to various post-translational modifications, making them dynamic to external perturbation. Proteomics can be divided into four areas: sequence, structural, functional and interaction and expression proteomics. These different areas used different instrumentations and have different focuses. For example, sequence and structural proteomics mainly focus on elucidating a particular protein sequence and structure, respectively. Meanwhile, functional and interaction proteomics concentrate on protein function and interaction partners, whereas expression proteomics allows the cataloguing of total proteins in any given samples, hence providing a holistic overview of various proteins in a cell. The application of expression proteomics in cancer and crop research is detailed in this chapter. The general work-flow of expression proteomics consisting the use of mass spectrometry instrumentation has also been described, and some examples of proteomics studies are also presented.