Proteomics has seen many advances over the last decade from improvements in mass spectrometry instrumentation to an expansion of new workflows and applications. The promise of single-cell proteomics has been a topic frequently discussed over the last 10 years, with the hope it becomes a reality, and widely accessible to the scientific community.
Unlike single-cell genomics and transcriptomics, there is no amplification process in proteomics so there is no intrinsic workaround for the minute amounts of protein available as research material in a single cell. In addition for single-cell proteomics to be a viable alternative to single-cell genomics and transcriptomics, it needs to match these for throughput, cover the same order of magnitude in terms of the number of unique proteins detected and identified, and be easily implementable as part of a wide range of cellular assays.
