Proteomic Profiles of Human Arterioles Isolated From Fresh Adipose Tissue or Following Overnight Storage

Arterioles are key determinants of the total peripheral vascular resistance, which, in turn, is a key determinant of arterial blood pressure. However, the amount of protein available from one isolated human arteriole may be less than 5 μg, making proteomic analysis challenging. In addition, obtaining human arterioles requires manual dissection of unfrozen clinical specimens. This limits its feasibility, especially for powerful multicenter clinical studies in which clinical specimens need to be shipped overnight to a research laboratory for arteriole isolation. We performed a study to address low-input, test overnight tissue storage and develop a reference human arteriolar proteomic profile. In tandem mass tag proteomics, use of a booster channel consisting of human induced pluripotent stem cell–derived endothelial and vascular smooth muscle cells (1:5 ratio) increased the number of proteins detected in a human arteriole segment with a false discovery rate of <0.01 from 1051 to more than 3000. The correlation coefficient of proteomic profile was similar between replicate arterioles isolated freshly, following cold storage, or before and after the cold storage (1-way analysis of variance; P = .60). We built a human arteriolar proteomic profile consisting of 3832 proteins based on the analysis of 12 arteriole samples from 3 subjects. Of 1945 blood pressure–relevant proteins that we curated, 476 (12.5%) were detected in the arteriolar proteome, which was a significant overrepresentation (χ² test; P < .05). These findings demonstrate that proteomic analysis is feasible with arterioles isolated from human adipose tissue following cold overnight storage and provide a reference human arteriolar proteome profile highly valuable for studies of arteriole-related traits.