Multiplexed Quantitative Proteomics for High-Throughput Comprehensive Proteome Comparisons of Human Cell Lines

The proteome is the functional entity of the cell, and perturbations of a cellular system almost always cause changes in the proteome. These changes are a molecular fingerprint, allowing characterization and a greater understanding of the effect of the perturbation on the cell as a whole. Monitoring these changes has therefore given great insight into cellular responses to stress and disease states, and analytical platforms to comprehensively analyze the proteome are thus extremely important tools in biological research. Mass spectrometry has evolved as the most relevant technology to characterize proteomes in a comprehensive way. However, due to a lack of throughput capacity of mass spectrometry-based proteomics, researchers frequently use measurement of mRNA levels to approximate proteome changes. Growing evidence of substantial differences between mRNA and protein levels as well as recent improvements in mass spectrometry-based proteomics are heralding an increased use of mass spectrometry for comprehensive proteome mapping. Here we describe the use of multiplexed quantitative proteomics using isobaric labeling with tandem mass tags (TMT) for the simultaneous quantitative analysis of five cancer cell proteomes in biological duplicates in one mass spectrometry experiment.