New technologies for proteomics research -: The RASOR Consortium

From being the new kid on the block of 'omics' technologies, proteomics has grown into a well recognised regular. The identification and quantitation of several thousands of proteins, or posttranslational modifications such as phosphorylation, is becoming routine, and these technologies are making their way from the dedicated specialists' laboratories into the broad community. This dramatic progress has been enabled mainly by improvements in mass spectrometry (MS) and bioinformatics. Decisive steps were the arrival of easy to use, high accuracy, high resolution MS instruments such as the Orbitrap¹; and the introduction of quantitative methods² that enabled systematic comparisons between proteomes and subproteomes on a large scale and with improving confidence. However, this progress has also made us more acutely aware of the limitations of proteomics and the challenges that lie ahead. These include getting to grips with the huge complexity of the proteome, which in mammalian cells may comprise hundreds of thousands of different protein species that make even our best efforts look rather insufficient; the ambition to generate data that reveal protein functions rather than catalogues of components; and the need to analyse small amounts of samples down to single cells. We will need new technologies and especially cross-disciplinary collaborations to push the frontiers of proteomics research beyond current boundaries. To promote such innovative approaches the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) initiated a strategic research programme to establish an Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration in Proteomic Technologies; this was awarded to the RASOR consortium, which started work in May 2005 (www.bbsrc.ac.uk/media/releases/2005/050512-next-step.html).