Quantitative proteomic analysis of pregnancy-related proteins from peripheral blood mononuclear cells during pregnancy in pigs

Information obtained from peripheral blood could help us understand the underlying mechanisms in autoimmune diseases, cancer, pregnancy, and other conditions. In this paper, we present the protein map of porcine peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) to better understand the molecular expression changes that occur during pregnancy using proteomic analysis. We detected 94 differentially expressed proteins in pregnant vs. non-pregnant (NP) pigs, and a representative set of the proteins was subjected to LC–MS/MS analysis. Furthermore, the identified proteins were categorized according to their biological process and molecular function. By classifying the proteins according to their functions, a large number of differentially regulated proteins involved in anti-oxidant, detoxification and stress response pathways were found, including peroxiredoxin (PRX) 1, 2, and 6, glutathione-S-transferase (GST), annexin A2, and A6, and heat shock protein 27 (HSP 27) during pregnancy (pregnancy d of E40, embryonic day 40; E70, embryonic day 70; and E93, embryonic day 93) compared with non-pregnancy. In this study, a proteomic approach utilizing 2-DE and LC–MS/MS was applied to evaluate specific molecular expression changes during pregnancy compared with non-pregnancy. Together, these data offer new information about the proteome map and factors that are differentially regulated during maintenance of normal pregnancy.