Quantitative analysis of complex peptide mixtures using FTMS and differential mass spectrometry.

Label-free LC-MS profiling is a powerful quantitative proteomic method to study relative peptide abundances between two or more biological samples. Here we demonstrate the use of a previously described comparative LC-MS method, differential mass spectrometry (dMS), to analyze high-resolution Fourier transform mass spectrometry (FTMS) data for detection and quantification of known peptide differences between two sets of complex mixtures. Six standard peptides were spiked into a processed plasma background at fixed ratios from 1.25:1 to 4:1 to make two sets of samples. The resulting mixtures were analyzed by microcapillary LC-FTMS and dMS. dMS successfully identified five out of the six peptides as statistically significant differences (p