Proteomics and Host—Pathogen Interactions: A Bright Future?

This chapter presents the interest of proteomics to survey host-pathogen interactions, a synthetic review of previous proteomics studies, the pitfalls of the current approach in surveys, new conceptual approaches to decipher host–parasite interactions, a new avenue to decipher the crosstalk diversity involved in trophic interactions in a habitat and 5-year view for future prospects on proteomics and host-pathogen interactions. Living organisms are constantly exposed to pathogens and a molecular war begins when a host encounters a pathogen. Nevertheless, a disease as an outcome of a pathogen attack remains an exception rather a rule. Pathogenic diseases like influenza and HIV/AIDS have seriously affected many societies worldwide as well as challenge our abilities to fight the responsible agents. Over the past decade, strains of many common pathogens have continued to develop resistance to the drugs that once were effective against them. Parasite genome sequences do not themselves provide a full explanation of the biology of an organism or on the molecular war involved in host-pathogen associations. Since the 1990s, proteomic tools have been successfully employed in a large number of studies to find and identify proteins involved in biological phenomena, such as host-parasite interactions. Thus, it is apparent that parasitologists and molecular biologists should attempt to improve their experimental design. In this chapter, new ways based on evolutionary concepts are suggested to enable further elucidation of the molecular complexities of host–pathogen genome interactions. These new ways could help to increase the knowledge about the molecular war involved in host–pathogen associations, taking into account the environmental factors.