Proteomic Analysis Using Mass Spectrometry

The mass spectrometry system used for the proteomic approach was a nanoAcquity UPLC-Xevo QTof MS system (Waters, Manchester, UK), using the ProteinLynx Global SERVER (PLGS) software (Waters, Milford, MA, USA), as previously described by [69 (link)] after downloading Uniprot database. The PLGS software applied the Monte-Carlo algorithm to obtain the difference of protein expression between the groups, considering p < 0.05 for downregulated proteins and 1 − p > 0.95 for upregulated proteins. After the identification and categorization of proteins, the Cytoscape 3.6.1 (Java^®) software (National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Rockville, MD, USA) was used for bioinformatics analyses with the ClueGO plugin for the determination of biologic processes groups [70 (link)].