Mission critical: the need for proteomics in the era of next-generation sequencing and precision medicine.

Next generation sequencing (NGS) has ignited an unprecedented pace of discovery in the biomedical sciences that is fundamentally transforming the way that we understand, diagnose and treat disease, and has motivated the belief that true precision medicine - medicine that is tailored to an individual's genetic, biochemical and exposure profile - will be a reality in the near term. With minimal sample requirement, NGS can enable the concurrent genome-wide study of genetic variations, transcriptomes, and certain epigenetic modifications. However, interrogating proteins as efficiently as DNA and RNA can be interrogated with NGS is lacking and this hampers more comprehensive views of molecular physiology and limits advances in biomedical science and precision medicine.