  We put forward the idea of establishing a novel interdisciplinary field of
research at the interface between quantum mechanics and proteomics. The new
field, called quantum proteomics, is defined as the large-scale study of the
electronic structure of the proteins that define an organism's proteome. The
electronic structure of proteins is unveiled with the aid of linear-scaling
quantum mechanical calculations. Such calculations provide information about
the energy levels of the proteins, the charges of their amino acid side chains,
their electrostatic potentials and permanent dipole moments ({\mu}). Since the
magnitude of the electric dipole moment of any protein is not null ({\mu}\neq0
Debye), the dipole moment can be employed to characterize the electronic
structure of each protein that belongs to an organism's proteome. As an
example, we investigate six proteins from the thermophilic bacterium
Methanobacterium thermoautotrophicum (Mth) whose atomic structures were
characterized by solution NMR spectroscopy.
