Proteomics: A new perspective for cancer

In the past decades, several ground breaking discoveries in life science were made. The completion of sequencing the human genome certainly belongs to the key tasks successfully completed, representing a true milestone in the biomedicine. The accomplishment of the complete genome also brings along a new, even more challenging task for scientists: The characterization of the human proteome. Proteomics, the main tool for proteome research, is a relatively new and extremely dynamically evolving branch of science, focused on the evaluation of gene expression at proteome level. Due to the specific properties of proteins, current proteomics deals with different issues, such as protein identification, quantification, characterization of post-translational modification, structure and function elucidation, and description of possible interactions. This field incorporates technologies that can be applied to serum and tissue in order to extract important biological information in the form of biomarkers to aid clinicians and scientists in understanding the dynamic biology of their system of interest, such as a patient with cancer. The present review article provides a detail description of proteomics and its role in cancer research.