Global Absolute Quantitation of Proteins in Human Whole Saliva by nLC-QIMS-TOF Employing MSE

While saliva can be considered as good biological fluid for monitoring biomarkers due to many advantages including its communication with blood and the non-invasive nature during its sampling, its applications to that purpose is still limited. As a part of efforts to expand the applications of saliva to the protein biomarker research, we carried out global absolute quantitation of proteins in human whole saliva (WS) by bottom-up proteomics techniques mainly based on nLC-Q-IMS-TOF employing $MS^E$. From the analyses of a pooled WS sample collected from 22 healthy Korean volunteers, 93 proteins ranging from $5.89{\times}10^1ng/mL$ (immunoglobulin heavy chain) to $1.59{\times}10^4ng/mL$ (${\alpha}-amylase$ 1) were confirmed. For the validation of the present results, human serum albumin in the same sample was quantitated by ELISA and its result was compared with that from the nLC-Q-IMS-TOF study. As a result, there was no significant difference between two results from individual approaches ($1.18{\times}10^4{\pm}0.03{\times}10^4 ng/mL$ from nLC-Q-IMS-TOF experiments vs. $1.23{\times}10^4{\pm}0.07{\times}10^4ng/mL$ from ELISA experiments, n=3, p=0.309). To our knowledge, this is the first global absolute quantitation of proteins in human whole saliva and information from the present study can be widely used as the first level reference for the discovery of new protein biomarkers from human whole saliva as well as for quantitative applications of human whole saliva proteins.