Proteins can be the root cause of a disease, and they can be used to cure it. The need to identify these critical actors was recognized early (1951) by Sanger; the first biopolymer sequenced was a peptide, insulin. With the advent of scalable, single-molecule DNA sequencing, genomics and transcriptomics have since propelled medicine through improved sensitivity and lower costs, but proteomics has lagged behind. Currently, proteomics relies mainly on mass spectrometry (MS), but instead of truly sequencing, it classifies a protein and typically requires about a billion copies of a protein to do it. Here, we offer a survey that illuminates a few alternatives with the brightest prospects for identifying whole proteins and displacing MS for sequencing them. These alternatives all boast sensitivity superior to MS and promise to be scalable and seem to be adaptable to bioinformatics tools for calling the sequence of amino acids that constitute a protein.

中文翻译：

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超越质谱技术，蛋白质组学的下一步。

蛋白质可能是疾病的根本原因，可以用来治愈疾病。桑格（Sanger）早在（1951年）就意识到了确定这些关键角色的必要性。测序的第一个生物聚合物是肽胰岛素。随着可扩展的单分子DNA测序技术的出现，基因组学和转录组学从此通过提高灵敏度和降低成本推动了医学发展，但是蛋白质组学却落后了。目前，蛋白质组学主要依靠质谱（MS），但不是真正的测序，它是对蛋白质进行分类，通常需要约十亿个蛋白质拷贝才能完成。在这里，我们提供了一项调查，该调查阐明了鉴定全蛋白并取代MS进行测序的最光明前景的几种替代方法。