Human tissue profiling with multidimensional protein identification technology

Profiling of tissues and cell types through systematic characterization of expressed genes or proteins shows promise as a basic research tool, and has potential applications in disease diagnosis and classification. We used multidimensional protein identification protein identification technology (MudPIT) to analyze proteomes for enriched nuclear extracts of eight human tissues: brain, heart, liver, lung, muscle, pancreas, spleen, and testis. We show that the method is approximately 80% reproducible. We address issues of relative abundance, tissue-specificity, and selectivity, and the significance of proteins whose expression does not correlate with that of the corresponding mRNA. Surprisingly, most proteins are detected in a single tissue. These proteins tend to fulfill specialist (and potentially tissue-specific) functions compared to proteins expressed in two or more tissues.