Immune complexome analysis

Kaname Ohyama1, Naotaka Kuroda

  • 1Course of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Nagasaki University, Nagasaki, Japan.

Immune complexes (ICs) are produced during an immune response and may reflect some aspects of an ongoing immune response. Therefore, the identity of antigens incorporated into ICs provides the information that in the future may aid in the development of diagnosis and treatment strategies for autoimmune diseases, infection, cancer, and transplantation therapy, and this information might be more relevant than the information on free antigens. Because ICs may contain many antigens, comprehensive identification and profiling of such antigens are more effective than immunoblotting detection. Here, we introduced mass spectrometry (MS)-based two approaches (immunoproteomics and immune complexome analysis) to comprehensively identify the antigens. Immunoproteomics is a concept to identify disease-associated antigens that elicit immune responses by combining protein separation (two-dimensional electrophoresis, gel-free separation), immunological detection (Western blotting), and MS or by combining immunocapture and MS. Immune complexome analysis is designed for identifying antigens in circulating ICs and consists of ICs separation from serum and direct tryptic digestion followed by nano-liquid chromatography-tandem MS.

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