Activity-based probes for functional proteomics

Achieving an understanding of the functional role of all proteins expressed by a complex organism will require the development of methods that enable the rapid monitoring of protein function on a global scale. Current genomics and proteomics technologies fall short of this goal since they measure only the relative abundance of transcripts and proteins, respectively. Recent efforts in several laboratories have led to the development of tagged chemical probes that selectively react with families of active enzymes based on shared mechanistic features. These activity-based probes (ABPs) permit the quantitation and comparison of multiple protein activities simultaneously in complex proteomes. In this paper, the general properties and design features of ABPs will be discussed with an emphasis on the use of ABPs for activity-based proteome analysis.