Reproductive Proteomics Comes of Age

When it comes to sex, Flaubert's prescient comment, “Le bon Dieu est dans le detail” hits the mark. Although “Diable” is often substituted, this poignant statement of the human condition also applies to the study of sexual reproduction. At all levels of human effort, the devil is indeed in the details, and nowhere are the “details” as convoluted, diversified, and obscure as found in the study of the biology of reproduction. Indeed, from the dawn of modern cell biology and the unfolding of the genetic basis of inheritance, the greatest biologists of the 17th and 18th centuries were almost obsessively focused on the biology of sex (or regeneration as it was known at the time).