Recently, I have been researching about DNA and I know the most popular method for detecting viruses is based on DNA. After learning about proteins, I wonder why we do not detect viruses based on virus proteins?
If it becomes true we can save a lot of money, instead of doing a PCR reaction, we can detect more than one disease in a single reaction.
For example, when I have the sequence of a virus from NCBI Genebank, I can know how many proteins the target organism produces and I can calculate the molecular weight of each protein. Then running it in a SDS-PAGE gel to see what the bands look like, may be that I can know the target organism is present or not?
For example, HIV produces 9 proteins and the molecular weight of each protein is different. So after doing electrophoresis, I have 9 bands. Based on the distance between each band and based on the molecular weight, it's possible to know HIV is present or not?