Abstract
Previous studies have established the association of sex with gene and
protein expression. This study investigated the association of sex with
the abundance of endogenous urinary peptides, using capillary
electrophoresis-coupled to mass spectrometry datasets from 2008 healthy
individuals and patients with type II diabetes, divided in one discovery
and two validation cohorts. Statistical analysis using the Mann-Whitney
test, adjusted for multiple testing, revealed 143 sex-associated
peptides in the discovery cohort. Of these, 90 peptides were associated
with sex in at least one of the validation cohorts and showed agreement
in their regulation trends across all cohorts. The 90 sex-associated
peptides were fragments of 29 parental proteins. Comparison with
previously published transcriptomics data demonstrated that the genes
encoding 16 of these parental proteins had sex-biased expression. The
143 sex-associated peptides were combined into a support vector
machine-based classifier that could discriminate males from females in
two independent sets of healthy individuals and patients with type II
diabetes, with an AUC of 89% and 81%, respectively. Collectively, the
urinary peptidome contains multiple sex-associated differences, which
may enable a better understanding of sex-biased molecular mechanisms and
the development of more accurate diagnostic, prognostic or predictive
classifiers for each individual sex.