Protease and proteasome inhibitors - (Feb/14/2011 )

What is the purpose of protease inhibitors and proteasome inhibitors?
Obviously by the name, its obvious to say its an inhibitor, but looking at the big picture, what is its purpose?

to prevent your protein of interest from being degraded by the proteases/proteasomes during purification.

Biochem_newbie on Mon Feb 14 18:57:39 2011 said:

In my opinion,most protease inhibitors are small molecule compound.We use those small molecule compound to prevent the degradation of our target protein beacuse the enzymes in vivo may degrade many proteins including our targeting when cells are broken.Proteasome inhibitors are one kind of protease inhibitors.