Protein marker for psychiatric and neurological diseases

Over the past years the approach to understand complex cellular mechanisms in the life and medical sciences has shifted from a hypothesis-driven to a discovery-driven science. Instead of focussing on a selected number of genes or proteins the discovery-driven approach seeks a comprehensive analysis and global description of cellular mechanisms. The trend to a discovery-driven science has also occurred at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry where basic and clinical scientists are trying to understand the pathogenic mechanisms of affective and neurological disorders. Proteomics, the comprehensive analysis of the protein complement of the genome of an organism, represents such a global bioanalytical effort that has been established at the institute. Our efforts using proteomics to gain a better understanding and to search for targets for depression, anxiety and multiple sclerosis are described.