A Standard Operating Procedure for Protein Extraction From Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Tissue: Enhancing Proteomics Applications

Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a life-threatening, non-communicable disease that remains underdiagnosed and poorly understood within the medical community. Furthermore, there is a lack of an effective medical therapy, aside from surgical intervention, that compels clinicians to address general cardiovascular risk factors for disease management. Thus, fishing putative new biomarkers and therapeutic targets from aneurysmatic tissue using untargeted proteomic approaches has emerged as a relevant strategy for the development of tools for earlier diagnosis, effective disease management, and a deeper understanding of the pathophysiology of AAA. However, given the heterogeneity of AAA tissue, the reproducibility of the results may be partially affected by the absence of a standardized method for protein extraction while ensuring high efficiency in protein yield. Therefore, this study aimed to address a key bottleneck in proteomic analysis of aneurysmatic study-heterogeneity in sample processing. Herein, we report the optimization of a protocol for AAA tissue homogenization and maximize protein extraction. A standard operating procedure (SOP) to process AAA tissue toward downstream proteomics applications is shared to enable more reliable and comparable data across studies and ultimately bolster the translation of tissue proteomics into clinically relevant tools for vascular medicine.