The effectiveness of treatment of renal diseases is limited because the lack of diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic markers. Despite the more than a decade of intensive investigation of urinary biomarkers, no new clinical biomarkers were approved. This is in part because the early expectations toward proteomics in biomarkers discovery were significantly higher than the capability of technology at the time. However, during the last decade, proteomic technology has made dramatic progress in both the hardware and software methods. In this review we are discussing modern quantitative methods of mass-spectrometry and providing several examples of their applications for discovery and validation of renal disease biomarkers. We are optimistic about future prospects for the development of novel of specific clinical urinary biomarkers.
Over the past decade, metabolomics has emerged as an important technique for systems biology. Measuring all the metabolites in a biological system provides an invaluable source of information to explore various cellular processes, and to investigate the impact of environmental factors and genetic modifications. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is an important method routinely employed in metabolomics. NMR provides comprehensive structural and quantitative information useful for metabolomics fingerprinting, chemometric analysis, metabolite identification and metabolic pathway construction. A successful metabolomics study relies on proper experimental protocols for the collection, handling, processing and analysis of metabolomics data. Critically, these protocols should eliminate or avoid biologically-irrelevant changes to the metabolome. We provide a comprehensive description of our NMR-based metabolomics procedures optimized for the analysis of bacterial metabolomes. The technical details described within this manuscript should provide a useful guide to reliably apply our NMR-based metabolomics methodology to systems biology studies.
In this study we show that via stable, retroviral-expression of tagged EGFR del (L747-S752 deletion mutant) in the PC9 lung cancer cell line and stable doxycycline-inducible expression of tagged Grb2 using a Flp-mediated recombination HEK293 cell system, the SH-TAP can be downscaled to 5 to 12.5 mg total protein input (equivalent to 0.5 - 1 × 15 cm culture plate or 4 - 8 × 106 cells). The major constituents of the EGFR del complex (USB3B, GRB2, ERRFI, HSP7C, GRP78, HSP71) and the Grb2 complex (ARHG5, SOS1, ARG35, CBL, CBLB, PTPRA, SOS2, DYN2, WIPF2, IRS4) were identified. Adjustment of the quantity of digested protein injected into the mass spectrometer reveals that optimisation is required as high quantities of material led to a decrease in protein sequence coverage and the loss of some interacting proteins. This investigation should aid other researchers in performing tandem affinity purifications in general, and in particular, from low quantities of input material.
Central to the study of chromosome biology are techniques that permit the purification of small chromatin sections for analysis of associated DNA and proteins, including histones. Chromatin purification protocols vary greatly in the extent of chemical cross-linking used to prevent protein dissociation/re-association during isolation. Particularly for genome-wide analyses, chromatin purification requires a balanced level of fixation that captures native protein-protein and protein/DNA interactions, yet leaving chromatin sections soluble and accessible to affinity reagents. We have applied a relative quantification methodology called I-DIRT (isotopic differentiation of interactions as random or targeted) for optimizing levels of chemical cross-linking for affinity purification of cognate chromatin sections. We show that fine-tuning of chemical cross-linking is necessary for isolation of chromatin sections when minimal histone/protein exchange is required.