University of Debrecen, Hungary.
Curr Med Chem. 2009;16(22):2806-15. doi: 10.2174/092986709788803141.
There is rapid development in the field of protein microarray technology with the promise of important advancements in the near future. Protein microarrays have been reportedly successful in serum tumor marker profiling as well as in drug discovery and medicinal chemistry when the effect of small molecules in protein-protein interaction is studied. Some of the bottlenecks of the technology are protein instability, problems with immobilization and stabilization of proteins to the corresponding surface, as well as aspecific and /or not preferred interactions and the lack of protein amplification techniques to generate sufficient amounts of low abundance proteins. For the time being, the number of genes in RNA expression chips is significantly greater than the number of proteins available for microchip based analysis of gene expression at the protein level. The automation and standardization routinely used with nucleic acid microarrays is not yet available in their protein chip counterparts. One of the emerging applications of protein microchips is biomarker discovery via chromatographic surface-based protein array techniques, which is applicable to minute amounts of samples with excellent detection limits using mass spectrometry based interrogation. In this paper the advantages, technical limitations and main biomedical application of protein microarrays are reviewed.
蛋白质微阵列技术领域发展迅速，有望在不久的将来取得重要进展。据报道，蛋白质微阵列在血清肿瘤标志物分析以及小分子在蛋白质相互作用中的作用研究的药物发现和药物化学领域取得了成功。该技术的一些瓶颈包括蛋白质不稳定性、蛋白质与相应表面的固定和稳定问题、非特异性和/或非首选相互作用以及缺乏蛋白质扩增技术来产生足够数量的低丰度蛋白质。目前，RNA 表达芯片中的基因数量明显大于可用于基于微芯片的蛋白质水平基因表达分析的蛋白质数量。核酸微阵列中常规使用的自动化和标准化在其蛋白质芯片对应物中尚不可用。蛋白质微芯片的一个新兴应用是通过基于色谱表面的蛋白质阵列技术发现生物标志物，该技术适用于使用基于质谱的检测的微量样本，具有出色的检测限。本文综述了蛋白质微阵列的优点、技术局限性和主要生物医学应用。
