Potential Applications of Laser-Capture Microdissection-Based Proteomics in the Study of Disease Progression

My research interests focus on applications of proteomics to the analysis of small tissue samples. In the biomedical field, a variety of tissues and their respective proteomes are of limited availability. In these cases it is convenient to separate the phenotypes of interest from the main tissues by using laser-capture microdissection (LCM), as it reduces samples variability when compared to whole tissue analysis. LCM-based -omics can be applied to diverse pathological cases as well as cancer research, and technologies such as LCM-transcriptomics are relatively well-developed due to the ease of RNA amplification. LCM-proteomics is a field in its infancy and there is a need for optimization of protein extraction and purification techniques for proteomic analyses. Insights into the applications of LCM-proteomics in the biomedical field are presented here.