Proteomics and Mass Spectrometry: What Have We Learned About The Heart?

Abstract

The emergence of new platforms for the discovery of innovative therapeutics has provided a means for diagnosing cardiac disease in its early stages. Taking into consideration the global health burden of cardiac disease, clinicians require innovations in medical diagnostics that can be used for risk stratification. Proteomic based studies offer an avenue for the discovery of proteins that are differentially regulated during disease; such proteins could serve as novel biomarkers of the disease state. For instance, in clinical practice, the abundance of such biomarkers in blood could be correlated with the severity of the disease state. As such, early detection of biomarkers would enable an improvement in patient prognosis. In this review, we outline advancements in various proteomic platforms used to study the disease proteome and their applications to the field of clinical medicine. Specifically, we highlight the contributions of proteomic-based profiling experiments to the analysis of cardiovascular diseases.

Exosomal miRNAs as potential biomarkers of cardiovascular risk in children

“…Indeed, a biomarker must be accurate, sensitive and specific; it needs to be altered in the relevant disease, and be able to discriminate between healthy and diseased subjects; quantification of the biomarker should be reliable and reproducible; the biomarkers should be consistent in different circumstances at different times, and the results from biomarker assays should be easy to interpret. A biomarker for diagnostic purposes should ideally be obtained from readily accessible body fluids, such as blood plasma, urine, and saliva and provide the clinicians with diagnostic information and aid in the medical decision making process [ 15 - 17 ].…”

Obesity alters molecular and functional cardiac responses to ischemia/reperfusion and glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonism

“…In parallel with advances in techniques for miR profiling, tools for the evaluation of whole-proteome have been developed. Such techniques have been used to demonstrate obesity-specific changes in abundance and phosphorylation of proteins related to ion transport, mitochondrial metabolism, antioxidant function and cardiac contractile function [13, 14, 17, 63]. Missing are studies exploring obesity-specific proteomic changes in response to cardiac ischemia and with reperfusion following relief of ischemia, and no published work has concurrently evaluated the changes in miRs and the proteome.…”

Trends in mass spectrometry imaging for cardiovascular diseases

“…In cardiovascular research, on the contrary, far more sophisticated techniques such as mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) are available to obtain more in-depth information on the involved components and pathways. The characterization of these biochemical changes provides information on the pathophysiology which may eventually be used in clinical applications [ 5 , 6 ]. MSI is an emerging tool and obtains spatial information of multiple molecules without prior knowledge; therefore, this might be an interesting complementary tool as compared with current clinical methodologies, for instance, immunohistochemistry in the field of tissue characterization.…”