Research Paper|Volume 10, Issue 7|pp 1682—1697

Global quantitative TPA-based proteomics of mouse brain structures reveals significant alterations in expression of proteins involved in neuronal plasticity during aging

Przemysław Duda¹, Olga Wójcicka¹, Jacek R. Wiśniewski², Dariusz Rakus¹

¹Department of Molecular Physiology and Neurobiology, University of Wroclaw, Wroclaw 50-137, Poland
²Department of Proteomics and Signal Transduction, Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry, Martinsried 82152, Germany

Received: May 25, 2018Accepted: July 15, 2018Published: July 19, 2018

Copyright: © 2018 Duda et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Aging is believed to be the result of alterations of protein expression and accumulation of changes in biomolecules. Although there are numerous reports demonstrating changes in protein expression in brain during aging, only few of them describe global changes at the protein level. Here, we present the deepest quantitative proteomic analysis of three brain regions, hippocampus, cortex and cerebellum, in mice aged 1 or 12 months, using the total protein approach technique. In all the brain regions, both in young and middle-aged animals, we quantitatively measured over 5,200 proteins. We found that although the total protein expression in middle-aged brain structures is practically unaffected by aging, there are significant differences between young and middle-aged mice in the expression of some receptors and signaling cascade proteins proven to be significant for learning and memory formation. Our analysis demonstrates that the hippocampus is the most variable structure during natural aging and that the first symptoms of weakening of neuronal plasticity may be observed on protein level in middle-aged animals.