Plasma proteomic analysis of systemic lupus erythematosus patients using liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry with label-free quantification

Rashmi Madda; Shih-Chang Lin; Wei-Hsin Sun; Shir-Ly Huang

doi:10.7717/peerj.4730

Plasma proteomic analysis of systemic lupus erythematosus patients using liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry with label-free quantification

PeerJ. 2018 May 8:6:e4730. doi: 10.7717/peerj.4730. eCollection 2018.

Authors

Rashmi Madda¹, Shih-Chang Lin^{2

3}, Wei-Hsin Sun¹, Shir-Ly Huang⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Life Sciences, National Central University, Zhongli, Taiwan.
² Division of Medicine, College of Medicine, Fu Jen Catholic University, Taipei, Taiwan.
³ Department of Rheumatology and Immunology, Cathay General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.
⁴ Institute of Microbiology and Immunology, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan.

Abstract

Context: Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a chronic inflammatory autoimmune disease with unknown etiology.

Objective: Human plasma is comprised of over 10 orders of magnitude concentration of proteins and tissue leakages. The changes in the abundance of these proteins have played an important role in various human diseases. Therefore, the research objective of this study is to identify the significantly altered expression levels of plasma proteins from SLE patients compared with healthy controls using proteomic analysis. The plasma proteome profiles of both SLE patients and controls were compared.

Methods: A total of 19 active SLE patients and 12 healthy controls plasma samples were analyzed using high-resolution electrospray ionization liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-ESI-MS/MS) followed by label-free quantification.

Results: A total of 19 proteins showed a significant level of expression in the comparative LC-ESI-MS/MS triplicate analysis; among these, 14 proteins had >1.5- to three-fold up-regulation and five had <0.2- to 0.6-fold down-regulation. Gene ontology and DAVID (Database Annotation Visualization, and Integrated Discovery) functional enrichment analysis revealed that these proteins are involved in several important biological processes including acute phase inflammatory responses, complement activation, hemostasis, and immune system regulation.

Conclusion: Our study identified a group of differentially expressed proteins in the plasma of SLE patients that are involved in the imbalance of the immune system and inflammatory responses. Therefore, these findings may have the potential to be used as prognostic/diagnostic markers for SLE disease assessment or disease monitoring.

Keywords: Biomarkers; LC-MS/MS; Label-free quantification; Lupus; Plasma; Protein profiling; Proteomic analysis; Proteomics.

Associated data

figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.5970748.v1

Grants and funding

This work was supported by grants from the National Central University and CGH collaborative project. The grant registration numbers are 104G909-4, 10310061-4, 10210061-3, VGHUST 105-G1-3-2, VGHUST 106-G1-3-2 and MOST 106-2320-B-008-004-MY3. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.