iTRAQ-based proteomic analysis reveals potential serum biomarkers of allergic and nonallergic asthma.
BACKGROUND
Asthma is heterogeneous disease with different phenotypes, endotypes and severities. Definition of these subgroups requires the identification of biomarkers in biological samples, and serum proteomics is a useful and minimally invasive method for this purpose. Therefore, the aim of this study was to detect serum proteins whose abundance is distinctively associated with different asthma phenotypes (allergic vs nonallergic) or severities.


METHODS
For each group of donors (32 healthy controls, 43 allergic rhinitis patients and 192 asthmatics with different phenotypes and severities), we generated two pools of sera that were analysed by a shotgun MS approach based on combinatorial peptide ligand libraries and iTRAQ-LC-MS/MS.


RESULTS
MS analyses identified 18 proteins with a differential abundance. Functional/network study of these proteins identified key processes for asthma pathogenesis, such as complement activation, extracellular matrix organization, platelet activation and degranulation, or post-translational protein phosphorylation. Furthermore, our results highlighted an enrichment of the "Regulation of Insulin-like Growth Factor (IGF) transport and uptake by Insulin-like Growth Factor Binding Proteins (IGFBPs)" route in allergic asthma and the lectin pathway of complement activation in nonallergic asthma. Thus, several proteins (eg IGFALS, HSPG2, FCN2 or MASP1) displayed a differential abundance between the different groups of donors. Particularly, our results revealed IGFALS as a useful biomarker for moderate-severe allergic asthma.


CONCLUSION
Our data suggest a set of serum biomarkers, especially IGFALS, capable of differentiating allergic from nonallergic asthma. These proteins reveal different pathophysiological mechanisms and may be useful in the future for diagnosis, prognosis or targeted therapy purposes.
['Nieto-Fontarigo|Juan José|JJ|0000-0002-4647-1508', 'González-Barcala|Francisco Javier|FJ|', 'Andrade-Bulos|Luis Juan|LJ|', 'San-José|María Esther|ME|', 'Cruz|María Jesús|MJ|0000-0001-9759-5466', 'Valdés-Cuadrado|Luis|L|', 'Crujeiras|Rosa María|RM|', 'Arias|Pilar|P|', 'Salgado|Francisco Javier|FJ|']
D001249:Asthma D015415:Biomarkers D002853:Chromatography, Liquid D006801:Humans D040901:Proteomics D053719:Tandem Mass Spectrometry
nonallergic asthma serum proteomics allergic asthma IGFALS asthma biomarker