The proteomic and metabolomic characterization of exercise-induced sweat for human performance monitoring: A pilot investigation

PLoS One. 2018 Nov 1;13(11):e0203133. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0203133. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

Sweat is a biofluid with several attractive attributes. However, investigation into sweat for biomarker discovery applications is still in its infancy. To add support for the use of sweat as a non-invasive media for human performance monitoring, volunteer participants were subjected to a physical exertion model using a treadmill. Following exercise, sweat was collected, aliquotted, and analyzed for metabolite and protein content via high-resolution mass spectrometry. Overall, the proteomic analysis illustrates significant enrichment steps will be required for proteomic biomarker discovery from single sweat samples as protein abundance is low in this medium. Furthermore, the results indicate a potential for protein degradation, or a large number of low molecular weight protein/peptides, in these samples. Metabolomic analysis shows a strong correlation in the overall abundance among sweat metabolites. Finally, hierarchical clustering of participant metabolite abundances show trends emerging, although no significant trends were observed (alpha = 0.8, lambda = 1 standard error via cross validation). However, these data suggest with a greater number of biological replicates, stronger, statistically significant results, can be obtained. Collectively, this study represents the first to simultaneously use both proteomic and metabolomic analysis to investigate sweat. These data highlight several pitfalls of sweat analysis for biomarker discovery applications.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Exercise*
  • Humans
  • Metabolome
  • Metabolomics* / methods
  • Middle Aged
  • Military Personnel
  • Physical Endurance
  • Pilot Projects
  • Proteome / analysis
  • Proteome / metabolism
  • Proteomics* / methods
  • Sweat / chemistry
  • Sweat / metabolism*
  • Young Adult

Substances

  • Proteome

Grants and funding

The funders, UES Inc. and InfoSciTex Corp., are commercial companies who provided support in the form of salaries for authors, SWH, ZKS, AVQ, NMS, JJE. United States Air Force provided support for this work via subcontract to UES Inc. (FA8650-14-D-6516). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.