The varied landscape of the adaptive immune response is determined by the peptides
presented by immune cells, derived from viral or microbial pathogens or cancerous
cells. The study of immune biomarkers or antigens is not new, and classical methods
such as agglutination, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, or Western blotting have
been used for many years to study the immune response to vaccination or disease. However,
in many of these traditional techniques, protein or peptide identification has often
been the bottleneck. Recent progress in genomics and mass spectrometry have led to
many of the rapid advances in proteomics approaches. Immunoproteomics describes a
rapidly growing collection of approaches that have the common goal of identifying
and measuring antigenic peptides or proteins. This includes gel-based, array-based,
mass spectrometry-based, DNA-based, or in silico approaches. Immunoproteomics is yielding
an understanding of disease and disease progression, vaccine candidates, and biomarkers.
This review gives an overview of immunoproteomics and closely related technologies
that are used to define the full set of protein antigens targeted by the immune system
during disease.
