The Use of Proteomics as a Novel Tool in Aflatoxin Research

Abstract

The field of system biology among the disciplines, genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and other “omics” technologies, has become one of the important scientific fields nowadays and will play a major role in investigating biological processes on a global level. Huge financial, technological and organisation efforts are needed to perform system biology based approaches. Progresses in molecular biology have led to the sequencing of the whole genome of several organisms, ranging from bacteria to various mammals including human. While the term “genomics” has already been used for a long time, new technologies such as transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics have been introduced during the last two decades and are beginning to expand rapidly. In general the “omics technologies” deal with hundreds or thousands of genes and/or their products such as mRNA, proteins or metabolites. Genomics is the study of genes, their variation and function by sequencing and mapping them. Similarly, transcriptomics deals with information at the messenger RNA (mRNA) level in an organism, tissue or cells at a given time by providing quantitative or semi-quantitative data. The transcriptome is however, not a straight copy of the genome, since the sequence of RNA molecules can be altered due to differential splicing and RNA editing. In contrast to the genome, which is static, the transcriptome is changing depending on environmental signals. Although, genomics and transcriptomics provide huge amount of information for understanding biological processes, the knowledge regarding the products of genes and transcripts remained underutilized. While, in last three decades predominantly genes and gene expression profiles were investigated and genomics has become the major side in biosciences, the analysis of proteins in a global approach was neglected mostly. However, since the 1990s also proteomics has gained increasing interest in the field of biosciences. The term proteomics was mentioned for the first time in Siena/Italy by Marc Wilkins in 1994 on occasion of the symposium on “2D Electrophoresis: from protein maps to genomes" (Wilkins 1997). Proteomics is defined as the qualitative and quantitative comparison of proteins in a cell or organism under defined conditions at a given time point. In other words proteomics is a term coined to comprise a field that attempts to understand the expression, function and regulation of the entire set of proteins encoded by an organism (Liebler 2002). In addition, since the proteins within a cell are the functioning units, their expression is strongly influenced by the environmental signals such as drugs, toxins, stress, age and other surrounding conditions. It is a complementary technology to genomic as well as transcriptomic research (Wilkins et al., 2007). Proteomics aims to deliver statistically