Fig. 3.

General scheme of current proteomic, for clinical metabolic research. Human body fluids (i.e. serum, urine and blood) have to be properly stored and prepared with optimised protocols. Subsequently, the proteins should be purifified and/or isolated to get digested peptides. The adequate 2-DE (two-dimensional gel electrophoresis), HPLC (high-performance liquid chromatography) or TOF-MS (time-of-flight mass spectrometer) based strategy is applied, and once we get the data (potential biomarkers), validation assays (i.e. ELISA and/or western blotting) can be carried out choosing specifific antibodies to identify real protein-biomarkers.