Quantitative peptidomics to measure neuropeptide levels in animal models relevant to psychiatric disorders.

Neuropeptides play many important roles in cell-cell signaling and are involved in the control of anxiety, depression, pain, reward pathways, and many other processes that are relevant to psychiatric disorders. Mass spectrometry-based peptidomics techniques can identify the precise forms of peptides that are present in a given tissue. Utilizing this technique, peptides with any posttranslational modifications can be identified, and the exact sequence of the peptides can be determined. Unlike radioimmunoassays, which are limited by specific antibodies and often cannot discriminate between different lengths of peptides from the same precursor, peptidomics reveals the precise sequence and allows for the identification of both known and novel peptides. The use of isotopic labels allows for quantitative peptidomics, which results in the ability to compare peptide levels between differently treated samples. These tags can be synthesized in five different isotopic forms, permitting multivariate analysis of up to five different groups of tissue extracts in a single liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry run; this is ideal for measuring changes in neuropeptides in animals subjected to drug treatments, or in comparing animal models of psychiatric disorders.