New label-free methods for protein relative quantification applied to the investigation of an animal model of Huntington Disease

PLoS One. 2020 Sep 4;15(9):e0238037. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0238037. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

Spectral Counts approaches (SpCs) are largely employed for the comparison of protein expression profiles in label-free (LF) differential proteomics applications. Similarly, to other comparative methods, also SpCs based approaches require a normalization procedure before Fold Changes (FC) calculation. Here, we propose new Complexity Based Normalization (CBN) methods that introduced a variable adjustment factor (f), related to the complexity of the sample, both in terms of total number of identified proteins (CBN(P)) and as total number of spectral counts (CBN(S)). Both these new methods were compared with the Normalized Spectral Abundance Factor (NSAF) and the Spectral Counts log Ratio (Rsc), by using standard protein mixtures. Finally, to test the robustness and the effectiveness of the CBNs methods, they were employed for the comparative analysis of cortical protein extract from zQ175 mouse brains, model of Huntington Disease (HD), and control animals (raw data available via ProteomeXchange with identifier PXD017471). LF data were also validated by western blot and MRM based experiments. On standard mixtures, both CBN methods showed an excellent behavior in terms of reproducibility and coefficients of variation (CVs) in comparison to the other SpCs approaches. Overall, the CBN(P) method was demonstrated to be the most reliable and sensitive in detecting small differences in protein amounts when applied to biological samples.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Biomarkers / analysis
  • Biomarkers / metabolism*
  • Cerebral Cortex / metabolism*
  • Cerebral Cortex / pathology
  • Disease Models, Animal*
  • Escherichia coli Proteins / metabolism
  • Huntington Disease / metabolism*
  • Huntington Disease / pathology
  • Mice
  • Mice, Inbred C57BL
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Proteome / analysis*
  • Reference Standards
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Tandem Mass Spectrometry

Substances

  • Biomarkers
  • Escherichia coli Proteins
  • Proteome

Grants and funding

This study was supported by a grant from Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca, Programmi di Ricerca Scientifica di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale (PRIN/20128XWKTX) to Maria Monti and Chiara Zuccato, and by CircProt (JPCOFUND-643417) to Elena Cattaneo.