Alzheimer's disease is some terrifying stuff. Fortunately, however, it is a disease that appears to be amenable to study with the advanced tools we have these days! Pull a Google Scholar search for "Alzheimer's disease proteomics" and you'll find a load of great studies that show that protein mass spectrometry may be exactly the way that we need to approach this for early disease diagnosis, stage monitoring, and hopefully!!!! for finding the upstream stuff so we can fix it.
Point in case: This open access study from groups at several institutions (hey! my good friend Katie is an author!) who used a combination of differential proteomic analysis and targeted MS/MS to profile disease progression. For the initial analysis they use simply MS1 high resolution monitoring and compare the peak profiles between the CSF samples of different stages of the disease. These differential lists provide them with ions to go after in their targeted assays! This is a pretty awesome application of a way a lot of us have thought of doing proteomics over the years...by just going after the stuff that is different!
How'd they find the stuff that was different? With Elucidator (and I'm not sure it exists for today's instruments...) but we have lots of tools we could use for things like this, like SIEVE and OpenMS.
Big highlights of this assay? Seeing biomarkers without any level of antibody-based enrichment or pulldown. Just finding them by high resolution differentials!
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