Profiling tear proteomes of patients with unilateral relapsed Behcet’s disease-associated uveitis using data-independent acquisition proteomics

PURPOSE: To explore whether unilateral relapse of Bechet’s disease-associated uveitis (BDU) causes differences in the tear proteome between the diseased and the contralateral quiescent eye and potential tear biomarkers for uveitis recurrence and disease monitoring. METHOD: To minimize interindividual variations, bilateral tear samples were collected from the same patient (n = 15) with unilateral relapse of BDU. A data-independent acquisition (DIA) strategy was used to identify proteins that differed between active and quiescent eyes. RESULTS: A total of 1,797 confident proteins were identified in the tear samples, of which 381 (21.2%) were also highly expressed in various tissues and organs. Fifty-one (2.8%) proteins differed in terms of expression between tears in active and quiescent eyes, 9 (17.6%) of which were functionally related to immunity or inflammation. Alpha-1-acid glycoprotein 1 (fold change = 3.2, p = 0.007) was increased and Annexin A1 (fold change = −1.7, p < 0.001) was decreased in the tears of the active BDU eye compared to the contralateral quiescent eye. CONCLUSIONS: A substantial amount of confident proteins were detected in the tears of BDU patients, including proteins that were deferentially expressed in the uveitis-relapsed eyes and the contralateral quiescent eyes. Some of these identified tear proteins play important roles in immune and inflammatory processes. Tear proteome might be a good source of biomarkers for uveitis.