Database Assembly for Peptide Mass Fingerprinting

The idea of peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) was first introduced in 1989, when protein research was facing a serious issue with automated Edman-degradation taking nearly one hour per reaction cycle. There was a dire need for more streamlined and fast ways to analyse proteins and peptides. Since the first steps towards such rapid analysis were made using FAB-MS and a relatively simple com- puter program called FRAGFIT, followed by the consecutive introduction of peptide mass fingerprinting as a simple yet effective tool to quickly identify frequently observed proteins in electrophoresis gels, PMF has developed to become the foundation of modern proteomics research and paved the way for many more high-throughput techniques, including shotgun proteomics and other bottom-up workflows.