astrategywithlabelfreequantificationofthetargetedpeptidesforquantitativepeptidomeanalysisofhumanserum

Peptidomics draws more and more attention in discovering useful biomarkers for early diagnosis of disease. However, there is lack of efficient quantification strategy in peptidome analysis. In this study, a strategy with label-free quantification of the targeted endogenous peptides based on peak intensity using mu UPLC-Q-TOF-MS/MS was developed for quantitative peptidome analysis of human serum. Different amounts of standard BSA tryptic digesting peptides were added into the same serum extracts for evaluation of the developed strategy, and it was observed that the average relative error of the targeted peptides was 6.42%, which was superior to the result obtained directly by commercially available software PLGS. It was also demonstrated that this quantification strategy could obviously increase the detection sensitivity of the peptide by DDA analysis. Then, this strategy was applied to comparatively analyze the peptides extracted from the serum of HCC or breast cancer patients and healthy individuals, respectively. Peptides with charge states up to 5 and molecular weight over 4000 can be reliably identified and quantified. This quantitative analysis method based on. mu UPLC-Q-TOF-MS/MS exhibited superior sensitivity than that by MALDI-TOF-MS commonly used in peptidome analysis. Finally, some interesting endogenous peptides related to corresponding diseases were successfully obtained