UC San Diego

A preliminary mass spectrometry based shotgun protocol was set up to compare the peptidome of plasma samples from healthy and hemorrhagic shock rats with the aim of verifying the possible role of uncontrolled proteolytic activity in circulatory shock. Since the hemorrhagic shock model requires heparin as anticoagulant, a preliminary experiment using plasma sample obtained in the presence/absence of heparin from healthy rats was performed to determine whether its presence is fully compatible with the peptidomic protocol proposed. The entire protocol was tested in a pilot experiment to compare the peptidome of healthy or heparin-anticoagulated rats subjected to hemorrhagic shock.