The Potential for Proteomics in Understanding Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Measuring biomarkers to predict or identify illness is a strategy that is increasingly used in many fields, including in the field of psychiatry and neurodevelopmental disorders [1-3]. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) define a biomarker as an objective measurement of a normal or pathologic biological process, or an objective measurement that indicates response to a treatment [4,5]. Most biomarker studies of neurodevelopmental disorders concentrate on gene changes. Indeed, the recent August 2013 PubMed search “neurodevelopmental genomic” yields 985 articles but the search “neurodevelopmental proteomic” yields 26 articles (Figure 1). When searching for specific neurodevelopmental disorders (SLOS, autism, fragile X), there is also a very noticeable and significant increase in results for genomic studies versus proteomic studies (Figure 1).