Proteomics Clustering Research of ITRAQ Markers in Plasma of AIDS Patients with Different Chinese Medicine Syndromes

Background: We aimed to distinguish the different Chinese medicine (CM) syndromes of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) patients at the proteomics level. Methods: We collected AIDS patients diagnosed with different CM syndromes from Weishi County, Kaifeng City, Henan Province, China, including Qi-deficiency syndrome (named QD group) and dampness-heat syndrome (named DH group). Healthy people were collected as controls from Weishi County, Kaifeng city, Henan Province, China. The plasma from three groups were labeled with ITRAQ, LC/MC was used for protein quantitative analysis. Finally, sequence search and cluster analysis were performed. Results: Overall, 27 different proteins were found. Three proteins were up-regulated and 2 proteins downregulated in the QD group, 11 proteins up-regulated and 13 proteins down-regulated in the DH group. Compared with DH group, there were 7 different proteins in QD group, among which 5 proteins were downregulated and 2 proteins were up-regulated. When the target protein of DH group was up-regulated, the protein of HC group was down-regulated correspondingly. Conclusion: The significance analysis and clustering of protein results showed that DH group was significantly different from QD group and HC group at the protein level (P<0.05). However, the QD group could not be effectively distinguished from the HC group. AAT, PF4, C-reactive protein and c4bp may be used as potential biomarkers in DH group. Mass spectrometry based on feature selection can be used to classify different CM syndromes.