Differential Peptide Analysis of Preterm and Term hUC-MSC Secretomes

The peptides from preterm and term hUC-MSC CM were reduced with 10 mM DL-dithiothreitol (DTT; Promega, WI, USA) for 1 h at 56 °C and alkylated with 55 mM iodoacetamide (Promega) for 1 h in the dark at RT. Thereafter, precooled acetone was added, and the peptides were precipitated over 3 h at − 20 °C. After centrifuging for 20 min at 20,000×g and 4 °C, the precipitate was dissolved in 300 μl of the following buffer: 50% triethylamine borane (Sigma) and 0.1% SDS (Sigma). Next, the peptide solution was desalted using a Strata-X C18 column (Phenomenex, Torrance, CA, USA) and dried and labeled with TMT reagent (TMT 6-plex Label Reagent; Thermo Fisher Scientific) for 1 h [36 (link)]. Next, the preterm and term samples were mixed at a 1:1 ratio on the basis of the total peptide amount. Analysis of labeled peptides was performed on a Q Exactive Orbitrap LC-MS/MS system (Thermo Fisher Scientific). Qualitative and relative quantitative analyses of the detected peptides were performed using the SWISSPROT_human database and Mascot software (version 2.3.01). Peptides with absolute fold change ≥ 1.5 and P value < 0.05 were considered differentially expressed.