scholarly journals High-Throughput Stool Metaproteomics: Method and Application to Human Specimens

mSystems ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos G. Gonzalez ◽  
Hannah C. Wastyk ◽  
Madeline Topf ◽  
Christopher D. Gardner ◽  
Justin L. Sonnenburg ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT Stool-based proteomics is capable of significantly augmenting our understanding of host-gut microbe interactions. However, compared to competing technologies, such as metagenomics and 16S rRNA sequencing, it is underutilized due to its low throughput and the negative impact sample contaminants can have on highly sensitive mass spectrometry equipment. Here, we present a new stool proteomic processing pipeline that addresses these shortcomings in a highly reproducible and quantitative manner. Using this method, 290 samples from a dietary intervention study were processed in approximately 1.5 weeks, largely done by a single researcher. These data indicated a subtle but distinct monotonic increase in the number of significantly altered proteins between study participants on fiber- or fermented food-enriched diets. Lastly, we were able to classify study participants based on their diet-altered proteomic profiles and demonstrated that classification accuracies of up to 89% could be achieved by increasing the number of subjects considered. Taken together, this study represents the first high-throughput proteomic method for processing stool samples in a technically reproducible manner and has the potential to elevate stool-based proteomics as an essential tool for profiling host-gut microbiome interactions in a clinical setting. IMPORTANCE Widely available technologies based on DNA sequencing have been used to describe the kinds of microbes that might correlate with health and disease. However, mechanistic insights might be best achieved through careful study of the dynamic proteins at the interface between the foods we eat, our microbes, and ourselves. Mass spectrometry-based proteomics has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of this complex system, but its application to clinical studies has been hampered by low-throughput and laborious experimentation pipelines. In response, we developed SHT-Pro, the first high-throughput pipeline designed to rapidly handle large stool sample sets. With it, a single researcher can process over one hundred stool samples per week for mass spectrometry analysis, conservatively approximately 10× to 100× faster than previous methods, depending on whether isobaric labeling is used or not. Since SHT-Pro is fairly simple to implement using commercially available reagents, it should be easily adaptable to large-scale clinical studies.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos G. Gonzalez ◽  
Hannah C. Wastyk ◽  
Madeline Topf ◽  
Christopher D. Gardner ◽  
Justin L. Sonnenburg ◽  
...  

AbstractStool-based proteomics is capable of significantly augmenting our understanding of host-gut microbe interactions. However, in comparison to competing technologies such as metagenomics and 16S rRNA sequencing, it is under-utilized due to its low throughput and the negative impact sample contaminants can have on highly sensitive mass spectrometry equipment. Here, we present a new stool proteomic processing pipeline that addresses these shortcomings in a highly reproducible and quantitative manner. Using this method, 290 samples from a dietary intervention study were processed in approximately 1.5 weeks, largely done by a single researcher. These data indicated a subtle but distinct monotonic increase in the number of significantly altered proteins between study participants on fiber- or fermented food-enriched diets. Lastly, we were able to classify study participants based on their diet-altered proteomic profiles, and demonstrated that classification accuracies of up to 89% could be achieved by increasing the number of subjects considered. Taken together, this study represents the first high throughout proteomic method for processing stool samples in a technically reproducible manner, and has the potential to elevate stool-based proteomics as an essential tool for profiling host-gut microbiome interactions in a clinical setting.ImportanceWidely available technologies based on DNA sequencing have been used to describe the kinds of microbes that might correlate with health and disease. However, mechanistic insight might be best achieved through careful study of the dynamic proteins at the interface between the foods we eat, our microbes, and ourselves. Mass-spectrometry-based proteomics has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of this complex system but its application to clinical studies has been hampered by low-throughput and laborious experimentation pipelines. In response, we developed SHT-Pro, the first high-throughput pipeline designed to rapidly handle large stool sample sets. With it, a single researcher can process over one hundred stool samples per week for mass spectrometry analysis, roughly 10 times faster than previous methods. Since SHT-Pro is fairly simple to implement using commercially available reagents, it should be easily adaptable to large-scale clinical studies.


2013 ◽  
Vol 420 ◽  
pp. 28-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luhou Shen ◽  
Johnny Zhang ◽  
Qian Yang ◽  
Nicholas E. Manicke ◽  
Zheng Ouyang

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Afshan Masood ◽  
Hicham Benabdelkamel ◽  
Assim Alfadda

Proteomics has become one of the most important disciplines for characterizing cellular protein composition, building functional linkages between protein molecules, and providing insight into the mechanisms of biological processes in a high-throughput manner. Mass spectrometry-based proteomic advances have made it possible to study human diseases, including obesity, through the identification and biochemical characterization of alterations in proteins that are associated with it and its comorbidities. A sizeable number of proteomic studies have used the combination of large-scale separation techniques, such as high-resolution two-dimensional gel electrophoresis or liquid chromatography in combination with mass spectrometry, for high-throughput protein identification. These studies have applied proteomics to comprehensive biochemical profiling and comparison studies while using different tissues and biological fluids from patients to demonstrate the physiological or pathological adaptations within their proteomes. Further investigations into these proteome-wide alterations will enable us to not only understand the disease pathophysiology, but also to determine signature proteins that can serve as biomarkers for obesity and related diseases. This review examines the different proteomic techniques used to study human obesity and discusses its successful applications along with its technical limitations.


2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-465 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wataru Asano ◽  
Yu Takahashi ◽  
Motoaki Kawano ◽  
Yoshiji Hantani

Peripheral arterial disease (PAD) is an occlusive disease that can lead to atherosclerosis. The involvement of arginase II (Arg II) in PAD progression has been proposed. However, no promising drugs targeting Arg II have been developed to date for the treatment of PAD. In this study, we established a method for detecting the activity of Arg II via high-throughput label-free RapidFire mass spectrometry using hydrophilic interaction chromatography, which enables the direct measurement of l-ornithine produced by Arg II. This approach facilitated a robust high-concentration screening of fragment compounds and the identification of a fragment that inhibits the activity of Arg II. We further confirmed binding of the fragment to the potential allosteric site of Arg II using a surface plasmon resonance assay. We concluded that the identified fragment is a promising compound that may lead to novel drugs to treat PAD, and our method for detecting the activity of Arg II can be applied to large-scale high-throughput screening to identify other structural types of Arg II inhibitors.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomasz Sadowski ◽  
Christian Klose ◽  
Mathias J. Gerl ◽  
Anna Wójcik-Maciejewicz ◽  
Ronny Herzog ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Jun Zhang ◽  
Yong Zhang ◽  
Chang Liu ◽  
Tom Covey ◽  
Julia Nielsen ◽  
...  

High-throughput analysis of compound dissolved in DMSO and arrayed in multiwell plates for quality control (QC) purposes has widespread utility in drug discovery, ranging from the QC of assay-ready plates dispatched by compound management, to compound integrity check in the screening collection, to reaction monitoring of chemical syntheses in microtiter plates. Due to the large number of samples (thousands per batch) involved, these workflows can put a significant burden on the liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC-MS) platform typically used. To achieve the required speed of seconds per sample, several chromatography-free MS approaches have previously been used with mixed results. In this study, we demonstrated the feasibility of acoustic ejection–mass spectrometry (AE-MS) in full-scan mode for high-throughput compound QC in miniaturized formats, featuring direct, contactless liquid sampling, minimal sample consumption, and ultrafast analytical speed. The sample consumption and analysis time by AE-MS represent, respectively, a 1000-fold and 30-fold reduction compared with LC-MS. In qualitative QC, AE-MS generated comparable results to conventional LC-MS in identifying the presence and absence of expected compounds. AE-MS also demonstrated its utility in relative quantifications of the same compound in serial dilution plates, or substrate in chemical synthesis. To facilitate the processing of a large amount of data generated by AE-MS, we have developed a data processing platform using commercially available tools. The platform demonstrated fast and straightforward data extraction, reviewing, and reporting, thus eliminating the need for the development of custom data processing tools. The overall AE-MS workflow has effectively eliminated the analytical bottleneck in the high-throughput compound QC work stream.


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