A Novel High Throughput MD-MALDI-Tof Platform for Serum Biomarker Discovery

摘要

Human serum contains hundreds of thousands of unique proteins, of which nearly 20% are predicted to be under 20 KDa, including most cytokines, chemokines, and growth factors. Therefore, from the perspective of high throughput "biomarker discovery", direct analysis of serum has recently been carried out using highly sensitive MALDI-Tof based approaches. Reported techniques have included the direct analysis of serum, solid phase extraction (SPE), and 1D separation approaches. While all of these approaches have met with varied level of successes, a multidimensional (MD) separation strategy would be expected to greatly enhance the identification of low-abundance LMW biomarkers. Therefore, we have developed a highly reproducible HTP MD-MALDI-Tof approach that complements downstream protein identification strategies.