Intact-protein analysis system for discovery of serum-based disease biomarkers

Profiling of serum and plasma proteins has substantial relevance to the discovery of circulating disease biomarkers. However, the extreme complexity and vast dynamic range of protein abundance in serum and plasma present a formidable challenge for protein analysis. Thus, integration of multiple technologies is required to achieve high-resolution and high-sensitivity proteomic analysis of serum or plasma. In this chapter, we describe an orthogonal multidimensional intact-protein analysis system (IPAS) (Wang et al., Mol Cell Proteomics 4:618-625, 2005) coupled with protein tagging (Faca et al., J Proteome Res 5:2009-2018, 2006) to profile the serum and plasma proteomes quantitatively, which we have applied in our biomarker discovery studies (Katayama et al., Genome Med 1:47, 2009; Faca et al., PLoS Med 5:e123, 2008; Zhang et al. Genome Biol 9:R93, 2008).