Quantitative, multiplexed workflow for deep analysis of human blood plasma and biomarker discovery by mass spectrometry.

Proteomic characterization of blood plasma is of central importance to clinical proteomics and particularly to biomarker discovery studies. The vast dynamic range and high complexity of the plasma proteome have, however, proven to be serious challenges and have often led to unacceptable tradeoffs between depth of coverage and sample throughput. We present an optimized sample-processing pipeline for analysis of the human plasma proteome that provides greatly increased depth of detection, improved quantitative precision and much higher sample analysis throughput as compared with prior methods.

Automated Microchromatography Enables Multiplexing of Immunoaffinity Enrichment of Peptides to Greater than 150 for Targeted MS-Based Assays.

Immunoaffinity enrichment of peptides coupled with analysis by stable isotope dilution multiple reaction mass spectrometry has been shown to have analytical performance and detection limits suitable for many biomarker verification studies and biological applications. Prior studies have shown that antipeptide antibodies can be multiplexed up to 50 in a single assay without significant loss of performance. Achieving higher multiplex levels is relevant to all studies involving precious biological material as this minimizes the amount of sample that must be consumed to measure a given set of analytes and reduces the assay cost per analyte.

Multiplexed, Quantitative Workflow for Sensitive Biomarker Discovery in Plasma Yields Novel Candidates for Early Myocardial Injury.

We have developed a novel plasma protein analysis platform with optimized sample preparation, chromatography, and MS analysis protocols. The workflow, which utilizes chemical isobaric mass tag labeling for relative quantification of plasma proteins, achieves far greater depth of proteome detection and quantification while simultaneously having increased sample throughput than prior methods. We applied the new workflow to a time series of plasma samples from patients undergoing a therapeutic, "planned" myocardial infarction for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a unique human model in which each person serves as their own biologic control.

Simplified and efficient quantification of low-abundance proteins at very high multiplex via targeted mass spectrometry.

Liquid chromatography-multiple reaction monitoring mass spectrometry (LC-MRM-MS) of plasma that has been depleted of abundant proteins and fractionated at the peptide level into six to eight fractions is a proven method for quantifying proteins present at low nanogram-per-milliliter levels. A drawback of fraction-MRM is the increased analysis time due to the generation of multiple fractions per biological sample. We now report that the use of heated, long, fused silica columns (>30 cm) packed with 1.

Integrated proteomic analysis of post-translational modifications by serial enrichment.

We report a mass spectrometry-based method for the integrated analysis of protein expression, phosphorylation, ubiquitination and acetylation by serial enrichments of different post-translational modifications (SEPTM) from the same biological sample. This technology enabled quantitative analysis of nearly 8,000 proteins and more than 20,000 phosphorylation, 15,000 ubiquitination and 3,000 acetylation sites per experiment, generating a holistic view of cellular signal transduction pathways as exemplified by analysis of bortezomib-treated human leukemia cells.