High-Throughput and In-Depth Proteomic Profiling of 5 μL Plasma and Serum Using TMTpro 16-Plex

Abstract

High-throughput and in-depth proteomic analysis of plasma and serum samples remains challenging due to the presence of multiple high-abundance proteins. Here, we provide a detailed protocol for proteomic analysis of serum and plasma specimens using a high-abundance protein depletion kit and TMTpro 16-plex reagents. This method requires only 5 μL serum or plasma, identifying and quantifying about 1000 proteins. A batch of 16 samples can be processed in 36 h. On average, each sample consumes about 1.5 h of mass spectrometer instrument time. Overall, our method can identify proteins across six orders of magnitude with high reproducibility (CV < 20%) using a shorter instrument time and less sample volume compared to existing methods. Thus, the method is suitable to be applied to large-scale proteomic studies.

Keywords: High-abundance protein depletion; Mass spectrometry; Peptide labeling; Plasma; Serum; TMTpro; Tandem mass tags.