  Owing to the complexity of higher eukaryotic cells, a complete proteome is
likely to be very difficult to achieve. However, advantage can be taken of the
cell compartmentalization to build organelle proteomes, which can moreover be
viewed as specialized tools to study specifically the biology and "physiology"
of the target organelle. Within this frame, we report here the construction of
the human mitochondrial proteome, using placenta as the source tissue. Protein
identification was carried out mainly by peptide mass fingerprinting. The
optimization steps in two-dimensional electrophoresis needed for proteome
research are discussed. However, the relative paucity of data concerning
mitochondrial proteins is still the major limiting factor in building the
corresponding proteome, which should be a useful tool for researchers working
on human mitochondria and their deficiencies.
