2.3 Proteomic mass spectrometry
Serum samples from GMPP and SMPP groups were pooled together separately and subjected to label-free proteomic technology to identify dysregulated proteins. Maxquant was implemented to process the raw mass spectrometry data. Proteins with false hits labeled by Maxquant including “potential contaminant”, “reverse” and “only identified by site” were excluded. And only proteins detected in both groups were included in the subsequent analysis. Ultimately, we obtained 276 proteins satisfying above criteria. The LFQ intensity was used to represent the protein expression level. The raw data are publicly available on integrated Proteome resources center (iProX) under the accession number IPX0001738000.