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The causative agent of Chagas disease (CD), Trypanosoma cruzi, claims thousands of lives each year. Current diagnostic tools are insufficient to ensure parasitological detection in chronically infected patients has been achieved. A host-derived metabolic signature able to distinguish CD patients from uninfected individuals and assess antiparasitic treatment efficiency is introduced. Serum samples were collected from chronic CD patients, prior to and three years after treatment, and subjected to untargeted metabolomics analysis against demographically matched CD-negative controls. Five metabolites were confirmed by high-resolution tandem mass spectrometry. Several database matches for sex steroids were significantly altered in CD patients. A murine experiment corroborated sex steroid perturbation in T. cruzi-infected mice, particularly in male animals. Proteomics analysis also found increased steroidogenesis in the testes of infected mice. Metabolic alterations identified in this study shed light on the pathogenesis and provide the basis for developing novel assays for the diagnosis and screening of CD patients.

Rat, mouse and human liver microsomes and S9 fractions were analyzed using an optimized method combining ion exchange fractionation of digested peptides, and ultra-high performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC) coupled to high resolution tandem mass spectrometry (HR-MS/MS). The mass spectrometry proteomics data have been deposited to the ProteomeXchange Consortium (http://proteomecentral.proteomexchange.org) via the PRIDE partner repository (Vizcaíno et al., 2013 [1]) with the dataset identifiers PXD000717, PXD000720, PXD000721, PXD000731, PXD000733 and PXD000734. Data related to the peptides (trypsin digests only) were also uploaded to Peptide Atlas (Farrah et al., 2013 [2]) and are available with the dataset identifiers PASS00407, PASS00409, PASS00411, PASS00412, PASS00413 and PASS00414. The present dataset is associated with a research article published in EuPA Open Proteomics [3].

Liver plays a key role in metabolism and detoxification, therefore analysis of its proteome is relevant for toxicology and drug discovery studies. To optimize for high proteome coverage, protein and peptide-level ion exchange fractionation were assessed using rat liver microsomes and S9 fractions. 2D-(SCX-RP)-LC–MS/MS analysis with peptide fractionation was subsequently employed for rat, mouse and human samples, yielding between 1400 and 1939 identified proteins, 58% of which were shared between species, and with relatively high sequence coverage. This rich dataset is specifically interesting for the toxicology community, and could serve as an excellent source for targeted assay development.