Abstract

The thalamus plays pivotal roles in the central nervous system as relay center for organizing information, such as auditory and visual senses from diverse brain regions and their re-distribution to the cerebral cortex. Brain diseases including schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, and bipolar disorder have been associated with the thalamus. We performed a shotgun proteome analysis of iTRAQ-labeled tryptic peptides of human mediodorsal thalamus protein extracts coming from two healthy male and two healthy female subjects. The shotgun workflow consisted of IEF fractionation, RP LC and MALDI-TOF/TOF mass spectrometric analysis. We were able to identify 542 proteins that are involved in different biological processes and from diverse cellular localizations. A considerable fraction of these proteins had not been identified by traditional proteomics methods such as 2-DE. The thalamus proteome contributes to the knowledge of the human brain proteome and future applications in basic and clinical research.