Platform for analysis of serum samples in discovery of biomarkers in diabetes Type 1

Finland has woeful world record in the relative occurrence of diabetes type 1 in the population. During the years a vast, well designed sample bank has been collected containing samples from most vulnerable children. The most valuables are the sample lines containing samples from those eventually got diabetes during the sample collection period. For discovery of early biomarkers, along with other platforms, a platform for direct analysis of serum samples after protein precipitation has been constructed. Because of the very limited sample sizes and their priceless nature special attention has been paid to ruggedness of the method. Also several internal standards are utilized and on the basis of their ratios the suitable one for overall normalization of several hundred samples will be chosen. The serum profile data is processed using our recently introduced MZmine software.1, 2 Initial studies of serum profiling for biomarker discovery will be presented. References 1. M. Katajamaa and M. Oresic, BMC Bioinformatics 6, 179.1 (2005). 2. M. Katajamaa, J. Miettinen, and M. Oresic, Bioinformatics in press (2006).