A clean-up strategy for identification of circulating endogenous short peptides in human plasma by zwitterionic hydrophilic liquid chromatography and untargeted peptidomics identification
Short peptides, namely di- tri- and tetra peptides, have been proven to play an important diagnostic role in several diseases. Therefore, the development of an analytical approach for their detection and identification is nowadays an important research goal. This paper describes an analytical procedure able to overcome the issues of short peptide isolation, clean-up and identification in plasma samples. Four different protocols were compared and tested to maximize both recovery and total number of identifications of short circulating plasma endogenous peptides.