Peptidomics: identification of pathogenic and marker peptides

Recent years have seen great advances in mass spectrometry and proteomics, the science dealing with the analysis of proteins, their structure and function. A branch of proteomics dealing with naturally occurring peptides is often referred to as peptidomics. Direct analysis of peptides produced by processing or degradation of proteins might be useful for example for detecting and identifying pathogenic and/or biomarker peptides in body fluids like blood. In this paper, we introduce one of the standard protocols for comprehensive analysis of serum-derived peptides, which consists of methods for purification of serum peptides, detection of peptides, pattern recognition and clustering (bioinformatics), and identification of peptide sequences. Peptide identification should be followed by the investigation of their pathogenic roles using for example synthetic peptides and the establishment of their usefulness as bioclinical markers.