The biotechnology is considered at present as one of the most important future technologies. In the last 25 years, many new realizations have been resulting in an enormous consolidated knowledge which led especially in the area of the genetic technology to extraordinary developments, even to the decoding of the human genetic constitution. With this decoding, "only" the writing of biological information is identified so far; but the instructions e.g. for the building of proteins – the "machines of life "- and the instructions for its biological activities are still incomprehensible.

Physiological and pathophysiological processes in the human organism manifest themselves in the amount of proteins existing in the body, the “proteome”, which indicates diseased changes of their biological activity.

The access to the human proteome as well as the discovery of new biomarkers for possible diseased changes in the organism are the substantial goals of the proteome research.

The understanding of the link between the structure and the functionality of the amount of proteins allows the identification of the cause of disease and the development of new therapy approaches.

For the investigation of these topics techniques are necessary, which on the one hand are able to separate extremely complex protein mixtures, like they are present in different body fluids, into their individual components and on the other hand are able to identify and quantify the separated proteins clearly.

Besides the well known and already established but cost-intensive and time-consuming methods for analysis, like gel electrophoresis and mass spectrometry, a large interest in further innovative more economical and substantially faster methods for the separation, identification and quantification of complex protein mixtures in particular exists.

This is also the aim of our working group “Photonic Sensor Technology”.