{"paper_id":"79c5bb23-09ed-41c1-a817-dac073a68de5","body_text":"Exploring proteomic pathways linked to infertility within endometriosis patients through Mass Spectrometry\nDOI:\nhttps://doi.org/10.13021/jssr2025.5188Abstract\nEndometriosis, a chronic gynecological disorder affecting over 10% of women\nof reproductive age globally, causes endometrial tissues to spread outside the uterus,\nleaving scarring, adhesions, and cysts. Furthermore, studies have shown that 25-50% of\nwomen living with endometriosis also experience infertility. Most studies done on the\nrelation between endometriosis and fertility have focused on anatomical irregularities and\nhormonal imbalances interrupting the ovum and sperm from uniting. However, this raises\nthe question if the cause of infertility within this demographic may also lie within the\nfollicular fluid (fluid produced by the antral follicles that protects a developing egg). In this\nstudy, we performed DIA mass spectrometry to identify potentially dysregulated proteins\nin the follicular fluid affecting ovum viability in 9 endometriosis patients and 5 patients\nseeking IVF treatment (set as a control). We used nanoparticles to ensure deeper\nproteome coverage and the ability to quantify low abundance proteins within the follicular\nfluid. We found 50 unique endometriosis proteins, 353 shared proteins, 437 control\nspecific proteins between our two groups. To identify the key biological processes that are\ndifferent between the upregulated and downregulated proteins, we used WebGestalt over-\nrepresentation analysis. In the downregulated protein group, the biological processes\nincluded humoral immune response, cell killing, and protein maturation. The upregulated\nprotein group biological processes were acute inflammation, metal ion transport, and\ntissue migration. Our results suggest that the follicular fluid proteome may be used to\nidentify biomarkers related to infertility and endometriosis.\nPublished\nIssue\nSection\nLicense\nThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.","source_license":"CC0","license_restricted":false}