Toward a global analysis of the human pituitary proteome by multiple gel-based technology.

We describe a comprehensive method for the analysis of complex proteomes, multiple gel-based technology (MGT), which combines in-gel IEF-LC-MS/MS and SDS-PAGE-LC-MS/MS strategies. MGT was applied to the analysis of the proteome of human pituitary tissue. A total of 1449 proteins were uniquely identified. To our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive proteomic analysis of human pituitary tissue to date. Categorization of the identified proteins revealed that MGT provides an excellent and largely unbiased access to proteins with diverse characteristics, including low-abundance proteins, membrane proteins, and proteins with extremes in pI and MW.