Human tear peptide/protein profiling study of ocular surface diseases by SPE-MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry analyses

• We analyze tears by MALDI-TOF profiling of DE and MGD diseases.
• We perform a warping alignment to solve spectra phase variation problems.
• Our model achieves a correct assignment of 89.3% for the study groups DE, MGD, and CT.
• MALDI-TOF/TOF analysis allowed identifying one marker peak as lipocalin-1.

The goal of this study was to investigate differences in tear peptidome/proteome profiles of aqueous-deficient dry eye, Meibomian gland dysfunction and control individuals. Tears from 93 individuals were collected by capillary and subjected to solid-phase extraction followed by MALDI-TOF for profiling analysis.Obtained spectra were aligned by variable penalty dynamic time warping (VPdtw) and the resulting data analyzed using multivariate statistics. Comparative analyses revealed good performance of VPdtw and a high discrimination of groups with a correct assignment of 89.3% using twelve informative peaks. SDS–PAGE followed by MALDI-TOF/TOF analysis allowed identification of lipocalin-1 as a biomarker candidate.

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