Peptides in body fluids and tissues as markers of disease

Abstract

The general awareness of the importance of peptides in physiology and pathophysiology has increased strongly over the last few years. With worldwide progress in the analysis of whole genomes, the knowledge base in gene sequence and expression data useful for protein and peptide analysis has drastically increased. The medical need for relevant biomarkers is enormous. This is particularly true for the many types of cancer, but other diseases such as Type 2 diabetes also lack useful and adequate diagnostic markers with high specificity and sensitivity. Despite advances in imaging technologies for early detection of diseases, proteomic and peptidomic multiplex techniques have evolved in recent years. This review focuses on the application of peptidomics technologies to peptides in health and disease. Peptidomics technologies provide new opportunities for the detection of low-molecular-weight proteome biomarkers (peptides) by mass spectrometry. Improvements in peptidomics research are based on separation of peptides and/or proteins by their physicochemical properties in combination with mass spectrometric detection, identification and sophisticated bioinformatics tools for data analysis. Therefore, peptidomics technologies offer an opportunity to discover novel biomarkers for diagnosis and management of disease (e.g., prognosis, treatment decision and monitoring response to therapy).

Oncopeptidomics: A Useful Approach for Cancer Diagnosis?

“…The proponents of the serum proteomic profiling methods for cancer diagnostics have now turned their attention to another possibility, proposing to interrogate the serum peptidome (the collective peptide population of serum) as a source of putative novel cancer biomarkers (12 ). Others have also postulated that the serum peptidome has potential for diagnostics (13 ). Significant literature is now forming around this principle, which is known as peptidomics, or when applied specifically to cancer diagnostics, as oncopeptidomics.…”

Peptidomic analysis of breast cancer reveals a putative surrogate marker for estrogen receptor-negative carcinomas

“…The methodology has been described by Schulte et al, 8 Tammen et al, 9 and Rai et al 10 in detail. Briefly, peptides are extracted from biological sources and fractionated by means of reversed phase chromatography.…”

“…DPD [5][6][7][8] is a peptidomic technique to generate comprehensive peptide displays of usually 41500 peptides from a variety of biological samples including blood plasma, urine, cerebrospinal fluid, cell and tissue extracts or cell culture supernatants. For clarification, the size we refer to for the term 'peptides' covers a mass range of 750-15 000 Da.…”

Changes in Serum Protein Profiles of Chickens with Tibial Dyschondroplasia

“…Serum and plasma are widely used for minimally invasive clinical diagnosis of diseases, since the metabolic changes in tissues under aberrant conditions are often reflected therein. The blood proteome is a promising source of biomarkers because disease-induced qualitative or quantitative changes in tissue proteins resulting from differential production, modification, or degradation leak into blood and alter their serum profiles that can potentially be useful as biomarkers [4,[7][8][9][10]. However, the discovery and validation of disease specific protein biomarkers in serum have been challenging *Address correspondence to this author at the USDA/ARS; O-307, Poultry Science Center, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA; Tel: 479-575-6189; Fax: 479-575-4202; Emails: narayan.rath@ars.usda.gov, nrath@uark.edu due to the presence of certain high abundant proteins which tend to mask the detection of their relatively less abundant counterparts [8,11].…”