Current Approaches on Viral Infection: Proteomics and Functional Validations

Zheng, Jie; Tan, Boon Huan; Sugrue, Richard; Tang, Kai

Currently, challenging problems arise when the ever-expanding repertoire of diverse viral proteomes leaves a large number of viral proteins uninvestigated or even larger numbers of virushost interactions functionally unverified. It relies heavily on high throughput technologies to elucidate the pathogenic biological networks involved in virus infections. At the interface between the realms of virology and proteomics, the conjunction of MS based proteomics with functional validation approaches exhibits a multidisciplinary effort to enhance our understanding into a wide range of viral diseases. These activity-based validation approaches integrated with proteomics include gene silencing, immunofluorescence staining, molecular cloning, drug inhibition, and microarrays, etc. Thus, it is important to stress that functional validations play an indispensable role to studying protein activities that are inaccessible to proteomic data along, contributing enormously and consistently to our understanding of pathogen-host interactions, vaccine designs, biomarker explorations, and drug discoveries.