CHAPTER 2
Protein Sequencing or Genome Sequencing.
Where Does Mass Spectrometry Fit into the Picture?
P. ROEPSTORFF'
1
Introduction
Advanced technology for the determination of DNA sequences has become
widely available in the last decade and has been used for sequencing cDNAs and
entire genomes from a variety of organisms ranging from viruses to man. As a
consequence, the amount of DNA sequence information entered in publicly
accessible databases has increased exponentially in the last decade (Fig. 2.1). This
growth has far exceeded the growth of sequences entered in databases based on
10000000000
1000000000
100000000
10000000
~
.0
S 1000000
;:l
Z 100000
10000
1000
Growth of the GenBank Database
100 L--_L-----lL-----I_----l._--L_-----L_--L_---L_---.J
1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000
Year
Fig. 2.1. The growth of the GeneBank database in the years 1982 - 1999 (Courtesy of Dr. S Brunak,
Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, Denmark).
I Department of Molecular Biology, Odense University, DK 5230 Odense M, Denmark.