Proteomics in metabolic diseases

Understanding the role of these differences cannot only provide biomarkers for early detection of diseases and prediction of disease severity, but it also creates potential to monitor treatment efficiency and possibly even predict the best treatment option for individual patients.

Our main fields of research interest concern the study of proteins to:

• Better understand diseases
• Find biomarkers for early diagnosis
• Understand variations within diseases
• Disease (and treatment) monitoring
• Find biomarkers for prediction of long-term complications

Our aim is to establish and use mass spectrometry-based proteomics methods to study the role of proteins in diseases. We are constantly looking to improve the pre-processing steps to enhance the detection of these proteins tailored for the different research questions, for example through sample fractionation (like isolation of extracellular vesicles) or enrichment and depletion of subsets of proteins.

Our team has also established the targeted proteomics workflow for accurate quantification of proteins and we use these workflows alongside the discovery-based proteomics. Example applications are: studying the proteins in specific organelles (like mitochondria), specific pathways (like glycolysis), or protein complexes (like the complexes involved in cholesterol transport). In the Systems Medicines applications, we collaborate with Prof. Barbara Bakker. She uses the accurate quantifications to create computational models to study the details of inborn errors of metabolism.