Table II.

Cost of Consumable Materials, Sample Preparation, and LC-MS Analysis Based on Different Quantitative Techniques (AQUA, QconCAT, Label-Free)

Process	Capital cost	Cost/replicate
Preparation of tissue sample
Homogenization reagents for 1 g of tissue	$198	$1
Microsomal protein concentration (Bradford assay) in triplicate	$218	$1
In-solution digestion reagents	$874	$6
In-gel digestion reagents	$1,363	$9
Total sample prep. cost with in-solution digestion	$1,290	$8
Total sample prep. cost with in-gel digestion	$1,779	$11
Cost of standards
AQUA per peptide	$524	$0.02
QconCAT (50 peptides)	$4,358	$0.00
Protein standard for label-free	$95	$0.01
Cost of instrument timea
QTOF or triple quadrupole connected to nano-HPLC	–	$128
SRM method development for (1–10 peptides)	–	$128
Personnel time cost for SRM method development	–	$47
Label-free data analysisb	–	$95
Total cost
Total sample cost of label-free quantification	–	$326
Total sample cost of AQUA quantification	–	$834
Total sample cost of QconCAT quantification	–	$4,669

^aInstrument time cost values are applied as a 2-h run per sample

^bThe value used to represent the cost of label-free data analysis does not take in account the cost of bioinformatics tools such as the software and the server