Cell Systems
Volume 2, Issue 3, 23 March 2016, Pages 185-195
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Article
Plasma Proteome Profiling to Assess Human Health and Disease

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cels.2016.02.015Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Automated, highly reproducible, 3-hr proteomic workflow from blood droplet to results

  • Plasma protein data reflecting allele differences, metabolic risk, and inflammatory status

  • Quantitative 1,000-protein plasma proteome

  • The plasma proteome profile as a proteomic portrait of a person’s health state

Summary

Proteins in the circulatory system mirror an individual’s physiology. In daily clinical practice, protein levels are generally determined using single-protein immunoassays. High-throughput, quantitative analysis using mass-spectrometry-based proteomics of blood, plasma, and serum would be advantageous but is challenging because of the high dynamic range of protein abundances. Here, we introduce a rapid and robust “plasma proteome profiling” pipeline. This single-run shotgun proteomic workflow does not require protein depletion and enables quantitative analysis of hundreds of plasma proteomes from 1 μl single finger pricks with 20 min gradients. The apolipoprotein family, inflammatory markers such as C-reactive protein, gender-related proteins, and >40 FDA-approved biomarkers are reproducibly quantified (CV <20% with label-free quantification). Furthermore, we functionally interpret a 1,000-protein, quantitative plasma proteome obtained by simple peptide pre-fractionation. Plasma proteome profiling delivers an informative portrait of a person’s health state, and we envision its large-scale use in biomedicine.

Keywords

plasma proteome profile
mass spectrometry
clinic
disease
human
apolipoproteins
blood analysis

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This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).