Background: Protein microarrays have the potential to join the field of quantitative proteomics as a standard method. This antibody-based experimental platform allows the highly sensitive and highly specific quantification of selected target proteins and excels with high sample capacity. As a key feature, numerous arrays can be produced in parallel, thus minimizing sample consumption.
Objective: The recent progress made in the field of reverse phase protein arrays is summarized, with a focus on the introduction of normalization measures, as introduced in the authors' infrared-based protein arrays with quantitative readout approach.
Conclusion: Tumor biology as well as drug discovery applications will soon benefit from the comprehensive description of signaling pathways and protein microarrays are an appropriate tool to achieve this goal.