Phosphoproteomics Analysis of Elderly people with sarcopenia

Sarcopenia is a progressive and systemic skeletal muscle disease that involves an accelerated loss of muscle mass and function. It is associated with increased adverse outcomes, including falls, functional decline, frailty, and death. With the advent of an aging society, sarcopenia has become a focus of intensive research. However, the molecular signaling pathways and phosphosignaling transduction changes in patients with sarcopenia are still unclear. To this end, we performed a quantitative mass spectrometry-based phosphoproteomics study on 6 patients with sarcopenia and 6 normal elderly subjects, and quantitatively analyzed 6163 phosphorylation sites of 2253 proteins. Gene Ontology (GO) functional enrichment and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway enrichment analysis showed that many phosphorylated proteins are involved in sarcomere organization and muscle filament sliding pathways. Kinase prediction analysis suggests that serine/threonine protein kinases VRK1, VRK2, etc. may play an important role in abnormal muscle metabolism. This study greatly expands our understanding of this disease by performing phosphoproteomics analysis on patients with sarcopenia. These findings provide a basis for the study of other age-related diseases.