This Facility offers researchers not only different proteomic services but also courses and workshops. The staff of the Facility has two main objectives: To provide the scientific community with a proteomics service and to improve new protocols appearing in this new area of Biology. The Proteomics Facility is financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology and the Genomics and Proteomics Chair of the Pharmacy Faculty.
Proteomics is an interdisciplinary science aimed at studying the proteome. A proteome consists of different proteins that are expressed by a genome, a cell or a tissue. The term proteome was used in 1995 for the first time. There have been two important events in the development of Proteomics:
- Genome sequencing performed on a large-scale (although the sequence of the genes is known, their function is unknown).
- The development of new separation techniques and methods of protein analysis (i.e.: Two-Dimensional Electrophoresis and Mass Spectrometry).
By sequencing the human genome we have learnt the number of genes in our genome. We also realized that this number is not very different from other organisms. The complexity of an organism, therefore, seems to be related with the proteins, because one gene may encode different proteins and these proteins may have post-translational modifications that allow them to perform different functions. Furthermore, the proteins are able to interact with other proteins forming a new protein complex with different functions.
Proteomics provides us with powerful tools to study gene function at the protein level. Proteomic applications have an enormous potential in the area of biomedicine for the development of drugs for chemotherapy, the nervous system, the cardiovascular apparatus, antibiotics, etc, and for diagnostic methods, vaccine development, etc…
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