Absolute protein quantitation of the mouse macrophage Toll-like receptor and chemotaxis pathways

Abstract

The Toll-like receptor (TLR) and chemotaxis pathways are key components of the innate immune system. Subtle variation in the concentration, timing, and molecular structure of the ligands are known to affect downstream signaling and the resulting immune response. Computational modeling and simulation at the molecular interaction level can be used to study complex biological pathways, but such simulations require protein concentration values as model parameters. Here we report the development and application of targeted mass spectrometry assays to measure the absolute abundance of proteins of the mouse macrophage Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) and chemotaxis pathways. Two peptides per protein were quantified, if possible. The protein abundance values ranged from 1,332 to 227,000,000 copies per cell. They moderately correlated with transcript abundance values from a previously published mouse macrophage RNA-seq dataset, and these two datasets were combined to make proteome-wide abundance estimates. The datasets produced during this investigation can be used for pathway modeling and simulation, as well as for other studies of the TLR and chemotaxis pathways.