"Diagnostics impact our lives in many ways, including disease diagnosis, treatment monitoring and long term environmental biomonitoring. The value of biomarker research in the field of diagnostics and predictive medicine has long been acknowledged. There is an increasing realisation that proteins and peptides mediate a rich information stream reporting on the health of an individual and the emergent techniques of proteomics have made possible the identification, characterisation and quantification of vanishingly low quantities of proteins in complex biological fluids. The analysis of the typical protein pattern from a pathological state by proteomics technology offers the opportunity to discover potentially new biomarkers for premature diagnosis and prognosis. Early developments in proteome analysis were based on protein separation through electrophoresis but it was the development of ‘soft’ ionisation modes and extended mass ranges in mass spectrometry which transformed the subject. Although the hold grail of proteomics (the complete characterisation and quantification of every protein in a cell) has not yet been met, the field has experienced some notable successes, and there has been a remarkable expansion of interest in the ten years passed since the term was first coined, (pubmed: 11 references containing the term ‘proteomics’ in 1996, over 12,000 papers in 2006). One of the areas in which proteomics can contribute a lot is that of biomarkers discovery and quantification. In this project we propose the combination of several novel proteomics approaches namely, positional proteomics, protein equalizer technology and absolute multiplexed quantification (QconCAT), to improve the efficiency of protein and peptide based biomarkers for animal disease diagnosis and monitoring. We will specifically apply these technologies to current challenges in animal health, an area largely left out if compared with human health."