ABSTRACT
One of the key goals in modern biology is to understand, in molecular terms, what a cell ‘thinks’ about. Subtle alterations in either the pattern of gene expression or post-translational protein modification can have dramatic effects on physiological status of cells. Identifying these changes provides investigators with insights into the basic biology of cellular decisionmaking. In addition, it can provide researchers with molecular targets for the identification of novel drugs suitable for therapeutic intervention. The use of high-throughput screens to identify altered cellular responses has become a major focus in the pharmaceutical industry. The ability to recover both quantitative and qualitative data easily and quickly makes it attractive as both a stand-alone assay and as a screening tool to reduce the number of samples that need to be analysed by more tedious methods.
