Laser microdissection for spatial proteomics of postmortem brain tissue

Abstract

Quantitative data of the proteome is highly valuable for providing unbiased information on protein expression changes related to disease or identifying related biomarkers. In brain diseases the affected area can be small and pathogenic events can be related to a specific cell type in an otherwise heterogeneous tissue type. An emerging approach dedicated to analysing this type of samples is laser microdissection (LMD) combined with LC-MS/MS into a single workflow. In this chapter, we describe two LMD methods for isolating tissue at the level of a small area and individual cells suitable for subsequent LC-MS/MS analysis.