Proteomic analysis of human hemodialysis fluid and salivary gland of the mosquito, Anopheles gambiae

Researchers at the Institute of Bioinformatics and Pandey Lab at Johns Hopkins University have successfully conducted two major proteomic analyses on human hemodialysis fluid, and in a separate study, the salivary gland of the female Anopheles gambiae mosquito. These studies will be published shortly in Molecular and Cellular Proteomics and Proteomics, respectively.

Hemodialysis is the process of removing blood from an artery, purifying it and returning it to a vein. This therapeutic procedure is used in cases of renal failure for purification of blood. As many of the larger and more abundant proteins are excluded from the hemodialyzing apparatus, the resultant fluid is a rich source of lower molecular proteins which could easily have remained undetected by the current techniques used to characterize the human plasma proteome. A detailed characterization of the proteome content of this fluid by mass spectrometry and the subsequent annotation of each protein was accomplished by this collaborative effort.

The female Anopheles gambiae mosquito harbours the malarial parasite as sporozoites in the salivary gland. A mass spectrometry approach based analysis of the salivary gland proteome resulted in the identification of several novel proteins that had not been identified previously.

References:

1) Molina, H., Bunkenborg, J., Reddy, G. H., Muthusami, B., Scheel, P. J. and Pandey, A. A proteomic analysis of human hemodialysis fluid. Molecular and Cellular Proteomics. In Press.

2) Dário E. Kalume, Mobolaji Okulate, Jun Zhong, Raghunath Reddy, Shubha Suresh, Nandan Deshpande, Nirbhay Kumar and Akhilesh Pandey. A proteomic analysis of salivary glands of female Anopheles gambiae mosquito. Proteomics. In Press.