Proteome analysis of maternal serum samples for trisomy 21 pregnancies using ProteinChip arrays and bioinformatics

A surface-enhanced laser desorption/ionization time of flight (SELDI-TOF)based ProteinChip System was used as a tool for rapid discovery and identification of protein patterns in serum that discriminate between trisomy 21 and unaffected pregnancies. We analyzed 24 serum samples from women carrying a trisomy 21 pregnancy and 32 with an unaffected pregnancy, ranging from 10.0 to 14.0 weeks of gestation. The resulting protein profiles were submitted to a clustering algorithm, a rule extraction, a rating, and a rule base construction step. For the generated combined rule base, the specificity and sensitivity for the prediction of a trisomy 21 pregnancy reach 97% and 91 %, respectively.