Serum Proteomic Profiling in Rheumatoid Arthritis by Antibody Suspension Bead Arrays

The versatility of protein microarrays provides researchers with a wide variety of possibilities to address proteomic studies. Therefore, protein microarrays are becoming very useful tools to identify candidate biomarkers in human body fluids for disease states such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA). In RA serum, there is a high prevalence of rheumatoid factor (RF), which is an antibody with high specificity against Fc portion of IgG. The presence of RF, in particular RF-IgM, has the great potential to interfere with antibody-based immunoassays by nonspecifically binding capture antibodies. Because of this concern, we describe a procedure to reduce the interference of RF-IgM on RA serum protein profiling approaches based on multiplexed antibody suspension bead arrays.