Recently, the advancement of hardware performance such as sensitivity and resolution of mass spectrometer and the development of various technologies such as novel quantitative methods and sample preparation methods remarkably improve depth and throughput of proteome analysis.

As a result, it has become possible to analyze small quantities of samples or large number of samples that were difficult to perform deep proteome analysis due to technical limitations. In this review, I introduce current trends of technologies on sample preparation and mass spectrometry-based quantitation, which contribute to improving the depth and throughput of proteome analysis.

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a common disorder that cause of death in cats. In the classification proposed by the International Renal Interest Society (IRIS), stage I and II CKD is difficult to diagnose accurately using markers (creatinine and blood urea nitrrogen). The urinary albumin levels in normal control and stage I CKD cats were 6.0±4.5 and 11.2±8.4 mg/dL, respectively, and the urinary transferrin levels were 0.09±0.42 and 0.52±0.79 mg/dL, respectively. Based on ROC curve analysis, the sensitivity and specificity of urinary albumin and urinary transferrin were higher than the plasma creatinine level. Among several candidates, we focused on carboxylesterase 5A fragment which is a 39.2 kDa protein as the most promising biomarker for CKD. To move carboxylesterase 5A fragment toward potential diagnostic use, we developed an enzyme immunoassay that enables the measurement urine carboxylesterase 5A fragment levels. The performance of the ELISA was satisfactory in terms of recovery (96.1–106.4%) and within-run (3.5–5.1%) and between-day (4.8–8.2%) reproducibility.

Enzootic bovine leukosis (EBL) is caused by bovine leukemia virus (BLV) infection and significantly impacts the livestock industry. However, the control of BLV infection is intractable in several region of world, where BLV infection is highly prevalent, including Japan. Many studies focused on host factors relating to BLV transmissibility and pathogenesis to develop fundamental knowledge about control strategy of BLV infection. On the other hand, the viral factors have not analyzed compared with host factors, because the BLV genome is highly conserved compared with other retroviruses. However, in understanding of infectious disease, the both host and viral factors are needed to be analyzed. Thus, we focused on viral factors, genetic variation. First, we demonstrated that the spontaneous mutations in BLV genome could affect virus production in vitro and proviral load, which is related to BLV transmissibility and pathogenesis in BLV-infected cows. The finding showed that the limited substitutions have a potential for changing transmissibility and pathogenesis. Next, we analyzed whether the limited substitutions could be related to EBL development, and demonstrated that the high and low virulence strains could be mainly isolated from EBL-developed and non-EBL cattle, respectively. Therefore, our studies could show that the spontaneous mutations affect biological properties of BLV relating to BLV transmissibility and pathogenesis. This report introduces new approach about interpretation of BLV transmissibility and pathogenesis. The knowledge would be useful for development of novel control strategy in BLV infection.

The animal food by-products, such as a whey and an egg white etc, are yielded in processing the food products. The animal by-products, like as the blood and the bone etc, are also derived in the disjoint of livestock. These products are often thrown out in the process of manufacturing the products. However, it is known that some of the animal food by-products and the animal by-products are nutritious and include bioactive components. Moreover, some of them are available as the food additives through their useful potencies. This review is an outlook for an animal by-products and an animal food by-products, and their nutrition and bioactivities including our reports. In addition, the functions and usages of egg white and whey in a meat processing are briefly described.

In a clinical diagnostic microbiology laboratory, the current method of identifying bacterial isolates is based mainly on phenotypic characteristics, such as the growth pattern on different media, colony morphology, Gram stain, and various biochemical reactions. These techniques collectively allow high-level accuracy in identifying most bacterial isolates, but they are costly and time-consuming. ln our clinical microbiology laboratory, we prospectively assessed the ability of matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) to identify bacterial strains that were routinely isolated from clinical samples. We performed direct identification of bacteria in urine using pretreatment kits for the direct application of positive blood culture bottles to MALDI-TOF MS. This method employing the rapid BACpro for pretreatment is a quick and reliable method for the identification of bacteria from infected urines.