Scientists have hailed a “new age of discovery” in medicine and industry following successful trials of a laboratory technique to study proteins.

Universities in Britain, Spain and Germany have published a joint paper in the international journal Science which says new methods will transform research into DNA sequencing.

Their method, the Reactome Array, pinpoints biochemical activity and energy within cells and identifies active proteins in individual microbes or communities of microbes.

As well as enabling scientists to have a better understanding of how the world functions at a microbial level, the Reactome Array also isolates new proteins which could be used in almost every part of life.

It is set to transform the way laboratories study DNA sequences and may have a dramatic effect in the way medicines, technology and agriculture are developed.

Co-author of the Science report Peter Golyshin, Professor of Environmental Genomics at Bangor University, North Wales, said: “The last 15 years have seen dramatic strides in our knowledge through the development of DNA sequencing.

“We can easily describe and catalogue the elements that make the DNA sequence, that is, the genes. To identify their function they usually have to be compared to existing databases of known gene function. In a sense what currently happens is a comparison against already known genes and proteins.”

Prof Golyshin added: “Reactome Array takes a wholly different approach. The technique identifies the whole set of biochemical reactions and, importantly, captures and identifies the proteins actively involved in the cell’s metabolism or energy exchange.”