Protein chips: from concept to practice

A series of exciting reports over the past two years has established the usefulness of protein chips and made important advances in preparing protein arrays. However, several technical challenges must still be addressed to make these tools available to the wider community of researchers. Here, we discusses these challenges and survey recent opportunities for creating quantitative assays, preparing and immobilizing large numbers of proteins, using detection methods to analyze the results of chip-based experiments, and using informatics tools to interpret these results.