PNNL

Abstract

A burn injury represents one of the most severe forms of human trauma and is responsible for significant mortality worldwide. Here, we present the first quantitative proteomics investigation of the blood plasma proteome response to severe burn injury by comparing the plasma protein concentrations in samples collected from10 healthy control subjects with those in samples collected from 15 severe burn patients at two different time-points following the injuries. The overall analytical strategy for this work integrated immunoaffinity depletion of the 12 most abundant plasma proteins with cysteinyl-peptide enrichment-based fractionation prior to LC-MS analyses of individual patient samples. Incorporation of an 18O-labeled “universal” reference among the sample sets ensured accurate relative quantification across samples. In total, 313 plasma proteins confidently identified with two or more unique peptides were quantified. Following statistical analysis, 110 proteins exhibited significant abundance changes in response to thermal injury. The observed changes in protein concentrations suggest significant inflammatory and hypermetabolic response to the injury, which is supported by the fact that many of the identified proteins are associated with acute phase response signaling, complement system, and coagulation system pathways. The regulation of ~35 proteins observed in this study is in agreement with previous results reported for inflammatory or burn response. There are approximately 50 potentially novel proteins previously not known to be associated with burn response or inflammation. Elucidating proteins involved in the response to severe burn injury may reveal novel targets for therapeutic interventions, as well as potential predictive biomarkers for patient outcomes such as multiple organ failure.