Abstract The central dogma of molecular biology describes the flow of genetic information from DNA to RNA and to proteins in living biological systems. Newly emerging technologies are being applied, and continually developed, to elucidate interactions between these biomolecules at all stages during the flow of genetic information in biological systems, and in relation to specific conditions (the growth conditions of plants). These newly emerging technologies encompass genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics, as well as the rapidly expanding and exciting field of bioinformatic tools and interactive databases. With the recent completion of the sequence of the genome of the ‘model’ plant Arabidopsis thaliana , a basis has been provided for the analysis of gene function in plants, which will no doubt have an impact on cereal plants as well. The importance of this ‘model’ genome project is enormous, as many important cereal crops, such as wheat, maize and rice, have large genomes and in some cases such as wheat are also polyploid, with related genes present on the different genomes. This may provide problems for the efficient and economical attempts to completely sequence these genomes, in the near future. With the combination of these newly emerging technologies, the stage is now set for cereal chemistry to capitalise on advances being made widely in protein chemistry, to apply these new methods, and thereby bridge the traditional gap between DNA and proteins, between the genome and proteome. In doing so, we stand to learn more about the inheritance of grain-quality attributes, and also, possibly more importantly, to discover more about the effect of growth and storage conditions on grain quality, and their effects on processing. In this review, the main aspects of proteomics are discussed, as well as the current and future applications of proteomic technologies to cereal grain science.