Functional Genomics and Proteomics in the Clinical Neurosciences

The purpose of this work is to familiarize neuroscientists with the available tools for proteome research and their relative abilities and limitations. To know the identities of the thousands of different proteins in a cell, and the modifications to these proteins, along with how the amounts of both of these change in different conditions would revolutionize biology and medicine. While important strides are being made towards achieving the goal of global mRNA analysis, mRNA is not the functional endpoint of gene expression and mRNA expression may not directly equate with protein expression. There are many potential applications for proteomics in neuroscience: determination of the neuro-proteome, comparative protein expression profiling, post-translational protein modification profiling and mapping protein-protein interactions, to name but a few. Functional Genomics and Proteomics in Clinical Neuroscience will comment on all of these applications, but with an emphasis on protein expression profiling. This book combines the basic methodology of genomics and proteomics with the current applications of such technologies in understanding psychiatric illnesses.