Assessment of a Capsule for Easy Urine Proteome Collection at Home

• Autor(a) principal: Bento, Rafael Guerreiro
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/158347
• topic: Proteomics; Syringe filters; Label-Free Mass Spectrometry; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Outras Engenharias e Tecnologias

Urine as a biological sample contains a wealth of information with great significance for med-ical diagnosis while also benefiting from an easy and non-invasive collection procedure. Thus, urine has become one of the standard samples for diagnosing multiple conditions and for proteomics-based biomarker discovery studies. In recent years, our group has developed an approach for Bladder cancer (BCa) diagnosis and patient monitoring based on proteomics, using the dysregulation of the urinary proteome to gain information regarding the patient’s state, such as tumour diagnosis and stage. Furthermore, analysing multiple urine samples from different time points provides valuable insight into the patient's treatment response and re-covery. However, monitoring is impaired by the lack of sample collection at the hospital. Thus, our goal was to develop a new easy-to-use method of urinary proteome collection so that patients could collect their samples at home. Thus, the urine proteome was collected using syringe filters and handled with a standard shotgun proteomics protocol. Multiple filter mem-branes were tested, from which the molecular weight cut-off membranes were the most effi-cient for our proposal. A proof of concept was conducted with BCa patient samples. The Filter Aided Sample Preparation (FASP) protocol was used as a control for the results obtained with our new approach. Our results show that the urine proteome can be collected and treated using our filter approach, although further research is needed to increase digestion efficiency to standard protocol levels. We propose syringe filtering as an easy approach to follow-up BCa patients and potentially any other diseases that can be assessed using the urine proteome.