Reference Materials for Measurement Quality Assurance in MS-based Clinical Proteomics

摘要

Proteomics is expected to produce major breakthroughs in medical diagnosis through the discovery of new clinical biomarkers. Research results, however, have demonstrated significant problems in the repeatability and comparability of proteomics research, greatly undermining confidence that proteomic measurements can reliably identify clinical biomarkers. To date, there has been little effort to establish robust measurement quality assurance tools for clinical proteomics that are necessary to validate protein biomarker discoveries. In response to these measurement needs, NIST has begun preparing reference materials that can be used to evaluate the quality of both qualitative and quantitative MS-based proteomics measurements. Plans are underway to produce peptide-based reference materials, as well as protein-based reference materials from simple proteomes (such as yeast lysate) and complex proteomes (human plasma).