In the current omics-age of research, major developments have been made in technologies that attempt to survey the entire repertoire of genes, transcripts, proteins, and metabolites present within a cell. While genomics has led to a dramatic increase in our understanding of such things as disease morphology and how organisms respond to medications, it is critical to obtain information at the proteome level since proteins carry out most of the functions within the cell. The primary tool for obtaining proteome-wide information on proteins within the cell is mass spectrometry (MS). While it has historically been associated with the protein identification, developments over the past couple of decades have made MS a robust technology for protein quantitation as well. Identifying quantitative changes in proteomes is complicated by its dynamic nature and the inability of any technique to guarantee complete coverage of every protein within a proteome sample. Fortunately, the combined development of sample preparation and MS methods have made it capable of quantitatively comparing many thousands of proteins obtained from cells and organisms.

在当前的组学时代，试图检查细胞内存在的基因，转录本，蛋白质和代谢产物的全部组成的技术已经取得了重大进展。尽管基因组学极大地增加了我们对诸如疾病形态和生物体如何对药物产生反应等方面的理解，但是，由于蛋白质在细胞内具有大部分功能，因此在蛋白质组学水平上获取信息至关重要。获得有关细胞内蛋白质的蛋白质组信息的主要工具是质谱（MS）。尽管从历史上讲它与蛋白质鉴定有关，但过去几十年的发展使MS成为一种强大的蛋白质定量技术。蛋白质组的定量变化由于其动态性质以及无法确保蛋白质组样品中每种蛋白质完全覆盖的任何技术的复杂性而变得复杂。幸运的是，样品制备和MS方法的共同发展使其能够定量比较从细胞和生物体获得的数千种蛋白质。