A proteomic study of serum from children with autism showing differential expression of apolipoproteins and complement proteins

Modern methods that use systematic, quantitative and unbiased approaches are making it possible to discover proteins altered by a disease. To identify proteins that might be differentially expressed in autism, serum proteins from blood were subjected to trypsin digestion followed by liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization-mass spectrometry (LC-ESI-MS) on time-of-flight (TOF) instruments to identify differentially expressed peptides. Children with autism 4–6 years of age ( n =69) were compared to typically developing children ( n =35) with similar age and gender distributions. A total of 6348 peptide components were quantified. Of these, five peptide components corresponding to four known proteins had an effect size >0.99 with a P