Sequencing the proteome, one molecule at a time

Whether you’re interested in why a living system works as it does or the reasons it goes awry, proteins are a critical part of the molecular picture. The proteins circulating in a person’s plasma can reveal early warning signs of a variety of diseases —and the majority of drugs for those diseases act on protein targets. Beyond medicine, protein identification can inform ecology studies , detect food fraud , shed light on how natural products are made , and let archaeologists peer into the deep past . These applications make proteins tantalizing analytes for high-throughput biology. Proteomic assays measure all of the proteins in a sample. A growing trend known as multiomics combines proteomic assays with genomic and transcriptomic studies, which assay DNA and RNA, respectively, to bring scientists insights that they couldn’t get otherwise. But multiomic studies are often limited by the throughput of current proteomic approaches. Several companies