Application of proteomics in brain's aging research

Abstract

Proteomics is one of the commonly used techniques to explore the protein composition or protein modification status in various healthy or diseased brain tissues in the past decades. Aging is an extremely complex biological process including physiological function decline with age increasing. To have a better understanding of protein changes along with aging, proteomics has been applied in aging-associated research trying to uncover protein changes or post-translational modification (PTM) occurs in aging with the advantage of screening proteins on a large scale. In this review, we summarized protein expression differences detected by proteomics in human or animal brains at different age stages. Protein differences among species or brain regions are obvious, which reminds us to carefully consider these factors in brain aging research. Important protein changes have been found in multiple brain regions in the aging process and these differentially expressed proteins are mainly involved in cellular components, activities of metabolism, mitochondria changes, oxidative modification and some specific signaling pathways.