Environmental proteomics, biodiversity statistics and food-web structure.

Pioneering studies in environmental proteomics have revealed links between protein diversity and ecological function in simple ecological communities, such as microbial biofilms. In the near future, high-throughput proteomic methods will be applied to more complex ecological systems in which microbes and macrobes interact. Data structures in biodiversity and protein surveys have many similarities, so the statistical methods that ecologists use for analyzing biodiversity data should be adapted for use with quantitative surveys of protein diversity. However, increasing quantities of protein and bioinformatics data will not, by themselves, reveal the functional significance of proteins. Instead, ecologists should be measuring changes in the abundance of protein cohorts in response to replicated field manipulations, including nutrient enrichment and removal of top predators.