When the last edition of this book was published in 2000, the field of proteomics was
in its infancy. At that time, multidimensional liquid chromatographic separations were
being introduced as an alternative to traditional gel-based techniques for separating
complex protein and peptide mixtures prior to mass spectrometric detection. Today,
this approach – referred to as shotgun proteomics – is considered routine for largescale
global analyses of protein mixtures.