Development Of An Optimized Metaproteomic Approach For Unraveling Inter-individual Variation In The Premature Infant Gut Microbiome

摘要

MS-based shotgun metaproteomics is a powerful approach to characterize infant fecal microbiomes and reveal inter-individual variations from multiple premature infants. By simultaneously monitoring human and microbial proteins, this metaproteomic approach uncovered dramatic variations of human and microbial protein ratios from different infants, as well as those within the same infant over a time course of early neonatal development. Abundant human proteins identified in the fecal sample often dominate the mass spectra and reduce the depth of microbial proteome measurement. Based on differentiable cell sizes and membrane resistance between human and microbial cells, a double filtering separation method was developed to successfully remove abundant human proteins within complex infant fecal samples. Although total microbial protein identifications were not dramatically increased, this optimized filtering-based approach increased total and unbiased microbial spectra within the sample.