Plasma proteome profiling study from Mann group

Sample related quality issues of clinical studies can be detected with a panel of contamination markers. In this study, uploaded on BioRxiv (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/11/30/478305.article-metrics), Geyer et al. report contamination markers for erythrocyte lysis, platelet contamination and blood coagulation, which are the main sources of quality issues in blood plasma samples. The panels allow the detection of contaminated samples, avoid biased results and enable the evaluation of biomarker candidates. To illustrate the significance of their finding, they surveyed more than 200 biomarker studies of which 50% reported proteins of the contamination marker panels as biomarker candidates.