Verification of candidate biomarkers relies upon specific, quantitative assays optimized for selective detection of target proteins, and is increasingly viewed as a critical step in the discovery pipeline that bridges unbiased biomarker discovery to preclinical validation. Although individual laboratories have demonstrated that multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) coupled with isotope dilution mass spectrometry can quantify candidate protein biomarkers in plasma, reproducibility and transferability of these assays between laboratories have not been demonstrated. We describe a multilaboratory study to assess reproducibility, recovery, linear dynamic range and limits of detection and quantification of multiplexed, MRM-based assays, conducted by NCI-CPTAC. Using common materials and standardized protocols, we demonstrate that these assays can be highly reproducible within and across laboratories and instrument platforms, and are sensitive to low µg/ml protein concentrations in unfractionated plasma. We provide data and benchmarks against which individual laboratories can compare their performance and evaluate new technologies for biomarker verification in plasma.Proteomic technologies based on mass spectrometry (MS) have emerged as preferred components of a strategy for discovery of diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic protein biomarkers. Because of the stochastic sampling of proteomes in unbiased analyses and the associated high false-discovery rate, tens to hundreds of potential biomarkers are often reported in discovery studies. Those few that will ultimately show sufficient sensitivity and specificity for a given medical condition must thus be culled from lengthy lists of candidates -a particularly challenging aspect of the biomarker-development pipeline and currently its main limiting step. In this context, it is highly desirable to verify, by more targeted quantitative methods, the levels of candidate biomarkers in body fluids, cells, tissues or organs from healthy individuals and affected patients in large enough sample numbers to confirm statistically relevant differences 1, 2. Verification of novel biomarkers has relied primarily on the use of sensitive, specific, high-throughput immunoassays, whose development depends critically on the availability of suitable well-characterized antibodies. However, antibody reagents of sufficient specificity and sensitivity to assay novel protein biomarkers in plasma are generally not available. The high cost and long development time required to generate high-quality immunoassay reagents, as well as technical limitations in multiplexing immunoassays for panels of biomarkers, is strong motivation to develop more straightforward quantitative approaches exploiting the sensitivity and molecular specificity of mass spectrometry.Recently, multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) coupled with stable isotope dilution (SID)-MS for direct quantification of proteins in cell lysates as well as human plasma and serum has been shown to have considerable promise 3- RESULTS Study de...

Mass spectrometry-based multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) quantitation of proteins can dramatically impact the discovery and quantitation of biomarkers via rapid, targeted, multiplexed protein expression profiling of clinical samples. A mixture of 45 peptide standards, easily adaptable to common plasma proteomics work flows, was created to permit absolute quantitation of 45 endogenous proteins in human plasma trypsin digests. All experiments were performed on simple tryptic digests of human EDTA-plasma without prior affinity depletion or enrichment. Stable isotope-labeled standard peptides were added immediately following tryptic digestion because addition of stable isotope-labeled standard peptides prior to trypsin digestion was found to generate elevated and unpredictable results. Proteotypic tryptic peptides containing isotopically coded amino acids ( MS is capable of sensitive and accurate protein quantitation based on the quantitation of proteolytic peptides as surrogates for the corresponding intact proteins. Over the past 10 years, MS-based protein quantitation based on the analysis of peptides (in other words, based on "bottom-up" proteomics) has had a profound impact on how biological problems can be addressed (1, 2). Although advances in MS instrumentation have contributed to the improvement of MS-based protein quantitation, the use of stable isotopes in quantitative work flows has arguably had the greatest impact in improving the quality and reproducibility of MS-based protein quantitation (3-5).The ongoing development of untargeted MS-based quantitation work flows has focused on increasingly exhaustive sample prefractionation methods, at both the protein and peptide levels, with the goal of detecting and quantifying entire proteomes (6). Although untargeted MS-based quantitation work flows have their utility, they are costly in terms of lengthy MS data acquisition and analysis times, and as a result, they are often limited to quantifying differences between small sample sets (n Ͻ 10). To facilitate rapid quantitation of larger, clinically relevant sample sets (n Ͼ 100) there is a need to both simplify sample preparation and reduce MS analysis time.Multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) 1 is a tandem MS (MS/MS) scan mode unique to triple quadrupole MS instrumentation that is capable of rapid, sensitive, and specific quantitation of analytes in highly complex sample matrices (7). MRM is a targeted approach that requires knowledge of the molecular weight of an 1 The abbreviations used are: MRM, multiple reaction monitoring; CE, collision energy; CV, coefficient of variation; CZE, capillary zone electrophoresis; DP, declustering potential; LOQ, limit of quantitation; Q1, quadrupole 1; Q3, quadrupole 3; SIS, stable isotope-labeled standard; XIC, extracted ion chromatogram; iTRAQ, isobaric tags for relative and absolute quantitation. Research

To survive extremely different environments, intracellular parasites require highly adaptable physiological and metabolic systems. Leishmania donovani extracellular promastigotes reside in a glucose-rich, slightly alkaline environment in the sand fly vector alimentary tract. On entry into human macrophage phagolysosomes, promastigotes differentiate into intracellular amastigotes. These cope with an acidic milieu, where glucose is scarce while amino acids are abundant. Here, we use an axenic differentiation model and a novel high-coverage, comparative proteomic methodology to analyze in detail protein expression changes throughout the differentiation process. The analysis identified and quantified 21% of the parasite proteome across 7 time points during differentiation. The data reveal a delayed increase in gluconeogenesis enzymes, coinciding with a decrease in glycolytic capacity. At the same time, beta-oxidation, amino acid catabolism, tricarboxylic acid cycle, mitochondrial respiration chain, and oxidative phosphorylation capacities are all up-regulated. The results indicate that the differentiating parasite shifts from glucose to fatty acids and amino acids as its main energy source. Furthermore, glycerol and amino acids are used as precursors for sugar synthesis, compensating for lack of exogenous sugars. These changes occur while promastigotes undergo morphological transformation. Our findings provide new insight into changes occurring in single-cell organisms during a developmental process.

Plasma biomarkers studies are based on the differential expression of proteins between different treatment groups or between diseased and control populations. Most mass spectrometry-based methods of protein quantitation, however, are based on the detection and quantitation of peptides, not intact proteins. For peptide-based protein quantitation to be accurate, the digestion protocols used in proteomic analyses must be both efficient and reproducible. There have been very few studies, however, where plasma denaturation/digestion protocols have been compared using absolute quantitation methods. In this paper, 14 combinations of heat, solvent [acetonitrile, methanol, trifluoroethanol], chaotropic agents [guanidine hydrochloride, urea], and surfactants [sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) and sodium deoxycholate (DOC)] were compared with respect to their effectiveness in improving subsequent tryptic digestion. These digestion protocols were evaluated by quantitating the production of proteotypic tryptic peptides from 45 moderate- to high-abundance plasma proteins, using tandem mass spectrometry in multiple reaction monitoring mode, with a mixture of stable-isotope labeled analogues of these proteotypic peptides as internal standards. When the digestion efficiencies of these 14 methods were compared, we found that both of the surfactants (SDS and DOC) produced an increase in the overall yield of tryptic peptides from these 45 proteins, when compared to the more commonly used urea protocol. SDS, however, can be a serious interference for subsequent mass spectrometry. DOC, on the other hand, can be easily removed from the samples by acid precipitation. Examining the results of a reproducibility study, done with 5 replicate digestions, DOC and SDS with a 9 h digestion time produced the highest average digestion efficiencies (~80%), with the highest average reproducibility (<5% error, defined as the relative deviation from the mean value). However, because of potential interferences resulting from the use of SDS, we recommend DOC with a 9 h digestion procedure as the optimum protocol.

We carried out a test sample study to try to identify errors leading to irreproducibility, including incompleteness of peptide sampling, in LC-MS-based proteomics. We distributed a test sample consisting of an equimolar mix of 20 highly purified recombinant human proteins, to 27 laboratories for identification. Each protein contained one or more unique tryptic peptides of 1250 Da to also test for ion selection and sampling in the mass spectrometer. Of the 27 labs, initially only 7 labs reported all 20 proteins correctly, and only 1 lab reported all the tryptic peptides of 1250 Da. Nevertheless, a subsequent centralized analysis of the raw data revealed that all 20 proteins and most of the 1250 Da peptides had in fact been detected by all 27 labs. The centralized analysis allowed us to determine sources of problems encountered in the study, which include missed identifications (false negatives), environmental contamination, database matching, and curation of protein identifications. Improved search engines and databases are likely to increase the fidelity of mass spectrometry-based proteomics.

It was inevitable that as soon as mass spectrometrists were able to tell biologists which proteins were in their samples, the next question would be how much of these proteins were present. This has turned out to be a much more challenging question. In this review, we describe the multiple ways that mass spectrometry has attempted to address this issue, both for relative quantitation and for absolute quantitation of proteins. There is no single method that will work for every problem or for every sample. What we present here is a variety of techniques, with guidelines that we hope will assist the researcher in selecting the most appropriate technique for the particular biological problem that needs to be addressed. We need to emphasize that this is a very active area of proteomics research -new quantitative methods are continuously being introduced and some 'pitfalls' of older methods are just being discovered. However, even though there is no perfect technique -and a better technique may be developed tomorrow -valuable information on biomarkers and pathways can be obtained using these currently available methods.

The inability to quantify large numbers of proteins in tissues and biofluids with high precision, sensitivity, and throughput is a major bottleneck in biomarker studies. We previously demonstrated that coupling immunoaffinity enrichment using anti-peptide antibodies (SISCAPA) to multiple reaction monitoring mass spectrometry (MRM-MS) produces Immunoprecipitation MRM-MS (immuno-MRM-MS) assays that can be multiplexed to quantify proteins in plasma with high sensitivity, specificity, and precision. Here we report the first systematic evaluation of the interlaboratory performance of multiplexed (8-plex) immuno-MRM-MS in three independent labs. A staged study was carried out in which the effect of each processing and analysis step on assay coefficient of variance, limit of detection, limit of quantification, and recovery was evaluated. Limits of detection were at or below 1 ng/ml for the assayed proteins in 30 l of plasma. Assay reproducibility was acceptable for verification studies, with median intra-and interlaboratory coefficients of variance above the limit of quantification of 11% and <14%, respectively, for the entire immuno-MRM-MS assay process, including enzymatic digestion of plasma. Trypsin digestion and its requisite sample handling contributed the most to assay variability and reduced the recovery of target peptides from digested proteins. Using a stable isotope-labeled protein as an internal standard instead of stable isotope-labeled peptides to account for losses in the digestion process nearly doubled assay accuracy for this while improving assay precision 5%. Our results demonstrate that multiplexed immuno-

There is an increasing need in biology and clinical medicine to robustly and reliably measure tens to hundreds of peptides and proteins in clinical and biological samples with high sensitivity, specificity, reproducibility, and repeatability. Previously, we demonstrated that LC-MRM-MS with isotope dilution has suitable performance for quantitative measurements of small numbers of relatively abundant proteins in human plasma and that the resulting assays can be transferred across laboratories while maintaining high reproducibility and quantitative precision. Here, we significantly extend that earlier work, demonstrating that 11 laboratories using 14 LC-MS systems can develop, determine analytical figures of merit, and apply highly multiplexed MRM-MS assays targeting 125 peptides derived from 27 cancer-relevant proteins and seven control proteins to precisely and reproducibly measure the analytes in human plasma. To ensure consistent generation of high quality data, we incorporated a system suitability protocol (SSP) into our experimental design. The SSP enabled real-time monitoring of LC-MRM-MS performance during assay development and implementation, facilitating early detection and correction of chromatographic and instrumental problems. Low to subnanogram/ml sensitivity for proteins in plasma was achieved by one-step immunoaffinity depletion of 14 abundant plasma proteins prior to analysis. Median intraand interlaboratory reproducibility was <20%, sufficient for most biological studies and candidate protein biomarker verification. Digestion recovery of peptides was assessed and quantitative accuracy improved using heavy-isotope-labeled versions of the proteins as internal standards. Using the highly multiplexed assay, participatFrom the A Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard,