Identification and Validation of SAA4 as a Rheumatoid Arthritis Prescreening Marker by Liquid Chromatography Tandem-mass Spectrometry
AeEun Seok,
Hyun-Jung Lee,
Sungeun Lee,
Jiyeong Lee,
Sora Mun,
Arum Park,
Yeon-Tae Chun,
Jae-Hyeon Lee,
Hee-Joung Lim,
Hee-Gyoo Kang
Affiliations
AeEun Seok
Laboratory of Signal Transduction and Disease Biomarker Discovery, Department of Senior Healthcare, BK21 Plus Program, Graduate School, Eulji University, Daejeon 34824, Korea
Hyun-Jung Lee
Department of Biomedical Laboratory Science, College of Health Sciences, Eulji University, Seongnam-si, Gyeonggi-do 13135, Korea
Sungeun Lee
Research Institute of DongDeok Pharmaceutical, Chungcheongbuk-do 27864, Korea
Jiyeong Lee
Department of Biomedical Laboratory Science, College of Health Sciences, Eulji University, Seongnam-si, Gyeonggi-do 13135, Korea
Sora Mun
Laboratory of Signal Transduction and Disease Biomarker Discovery, Department of Senior Healthcare, BK21 Plus Program, Graduate School, Eulji University, Daejeon 34824, Korea
Arum Park
Laboratory of Signal Transduction and Disease Biomarker Discovery, Department of Senior Healthcare, BK21 Plus Program, Graduate School, Eulji University, Daejeon 34824, Korea
Yeon-Tae Chun
Laboratory of Signal Transduction and Disease Biomarker Discovery, Department of Senior Healthcare, BK21 Plus Program, Graduate School, Eulji University, Daejeon 34824, Korea
Jae-Hyeon Lee
Research Institute of DongDeok Pharmaceutical, Chungcheongbuk-do 27864, Korea
Hee-Joung Lim
Forensic Science R&D Lab., Police Science Institute, Chungcheongnam-do 31539, Korea
Hee-Gyoo Kang
Laboratory of Signal Transduction and Disease Biomarker Discovery, Department of Senior Healthcare, BK21 Plus Program, Graduate School, Eulji University, Daejeon 34824, Korea
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic autoimmune disease that progresses into systemic inflammation and joint deformity. RA diagnosis is a complicated procedure, and early diagnostic methods are insufficient. Therefore, in this study, we attempted to identify new markers to improve the accuracy of RA prescreening. e identified differentially expressed proteins (DEPs) by using liquid chromatography tandem-mass spectrometry in health-prescreening sera with high rheumatoid factor (RF) values, and compared the findings with those from sera with normal RF values. We identified 93 DEPs; of these, 36 were upregulated, and 57 were downregulated in high-RF sera. Pathway analysis revealed that these DEPs were related to immune responses. Additionally, four DEPs were statistically analyzed by proteomic analysis; of these, SAA4 was significantly validated in individual enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays. Moreover, SAA4 was significantly upregulated in RA patients (n = 40, 66.43 ± 12.97 ng/mL) compared with normal controls (n = 40, 4.79 ± 0.95 ng/mL) and had a higher area under the curve than C-reactive protein. Thus, we identified SAA4 as a protein that was positively correlated with RF and RA. SAA4 may represent a novel prescreening marker for the diagnosis of RA.
