2-DIMENSIONAL ELECTROPHORESIS OF HUMAN PLACENTAL MITOCHONDRIA AND PROTEIN IDENTIFICATION BY MASS-SPECTROMETRY - TOWARD A HUMAN MITOCHONDRIAL PROTEOME

Owing to the complexity of higher eukaryotic cells, characterization o f a complete proteome is likely to be difficult to achieve. However, a dvantage can be taken of the cell compartmentalization to build organe lle proteomes, which can moreover be viewed as specialized tools to st udy specifically the biology and ''physiology'' of the target organell e. Within this frame, we report here the construction of the human mit ochondrial proteome, using placenta as the source tissue. Protein iden tification was carried out mainly by peptide mass fingerprinting, but other methods were also used (N-terminal microsequencing, blotting). T he optimization steps in two-dimensional (2-D) electrophoresis needed for proteome research are discussed. However, the relative paucity of data concerning mitochondrial proteins is still the major limiting fac tor in building the corresponding proteome, which should be a useful t ool for researchers working on human mitochondria and their deficienci es.