Fig 1.
Primary pure human gland mucus collection.
(A) Individual gland mucus bubbles, stimulated by a combination of 10 μM carbachol and 10 μM forskolin, formed under the water-saturated mineral oil on the tracheal mucosa, were picked up with sterilized microforceps and transferred into a sterilized Eppendorf tube for proteomics analysis. (B) A representative image of silver-stained protein bands from a human gland mucus sample collected as (A) on a Tris-Tricine 4–20% SDS polyacrylamide gradient gel. Protein molecular weight standard are shown on the left lane of the gel. Twice the same sample volumes were loaded on the far right lane.
Fig 2.
Proteins identified in human tracheal submucosal gland mucus by LC-MS/MS.
(A) A modified Venn diagram of showing distribution of proteins among three healthy human (HN) donors. Across the 3 donors, 5486 peptides and 441 proteins were identified. Of these, 61% (269 proteins, the shaded area) and 35% (154 proteins) were found in 2–3 and all 3 HN gland mucus samples, respectively. (B) Among these 269 proteins, 102 (38%) were categorized as proteins with “anti”-activities: antimicrobial, antiinflammatory, antiproteolytic and antioxidant. Other biological activities include: biological regulation, metabolic/multi-organismal/developmental processes, binding activity, and establishment of localization.
Table 1.
Protein families with protective functions found in gland mucus.
Table 2.
A comparative analysis of anti-proteins of 4 airway secretions.