Digestomics: an emerging strategy for comprehensive analysis of protein catabolism

When cells mobilize nutrients from protein, they generate a fingerprint of peptide fragments that reflects the net action of proteases and the identities of the affected proteins. Analyzing these mixtures falls into a grey area between proteomics and metabolomics that is poorly served by existing technology. Herein, we describe an emerging digestomics strategy that bridges this gap and allows mixtures of proteolytic fragments to be quantitatively mapped with an amino acid level of resolution. We describe recent successes using this technique, including a case where digestomics provided the link between hemoglobin digestion by the malaria parasite and the world-wide distribution of chloroquine resistance. We highlight other areas of microbiology and cancer research that are well-suited to this emerging technology.