PNNL

Abstract

Identification of novel diagnostic or therapeutic biomarkers from human blood plasma would benefit significantly from quantitative measurements of the proteome constituents over a range of physiological conditions. We describe here an initial demonstration of proteome-wide quantitative analysis of human plasma. The approach utilizes post-digestion trypsin-catalyzed 16O/18O labeling, two-dimensional liquid chromatography (LC)-Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance ((FTICR) mass spectrometry, and the accurate mass and time (AMT) tag strategy for identification and quantification of peptides/proteins from complex samples. A peptide mass and time tag database was initially generated using tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) following extensive multidimensional LC separations and the database serves as a ‘look-up’ table for peptide identification. The mass and time tag database contains >8,000 putative identified peptides, which yielded 938 confident plasma protein identifications. The quantitative approach was applied to the comparative analyses of plasma samples from an individual prior to and 9 hours after lipopolysaccharide (LPS) administration without depletion of high abundant proteins. Accurate quantification of changes in protein abundance was demonstrated with both 1:1 labeling of control plasma and the comparison between the plasma samples following LPS administration. A total of 429 distinct plasma proteins were quantified from the comparative analyses and the protein abundances for 28 proteins were observed to be significantly changed following LPS administration, including several known inflammatory response mediators.