PROTEOMICS OF THE VESSEL WALL

Abstract

Proteomics has made tremendous progress over the recent years. Initiatives, such as the Human Protein Atlas project, provide a great resource by capturing the in vivo location of proteins in different tissues and by making these data publically available (www.proteinatlas.org). Apart from the inherent limitations of antibody-based detection (antibody specificity, epitope masking, etc.), the only cardiovascular relevant tissue in the Human Protein Atlas is the heart. No large blood vessels are included in the tissue bank. At present, functional analysis tools do not capture some of the vascular proteins because these proteins are either only expressed during disease and/or not annotated as vascular proteins in the public databases. Our group introduced new methods for the use of proteomics to study the vascular extracellular matrix and applied them to uncover extracellular matrix degradation during aneurysm formation. Our current understanding of extracellular matrix remodeling during vascular diseases is limited to a few molecules of interest that are investigated intensively whilst others are not studied at all. Moreover, data on specificities or commonalities between the extracellular matrices of different vessels is sparse. It will be essential that high-quality vascular proteomic data investigating changes in the vessel wall with aging and diseaseare made publically accessible to advance the field (adapted from Mayr M. Vascular Proteomics – the forgotten blood vessels. Proteomics Clin Appl. 2013 Aug;7(7–8):463.).