Bioinformatic analysis
Bioinformatics analysis was employed to place the findings of urinary peptidomics within the biological context. Given that changes in peptide levels might be indicative of alterations in protease activity, the proteolytic events responsible for the secretion of the statistically significant GLP-1R agonists based urinary peptides were investigated by the open-source online tool “Proteasix” (http://www.proteasix.org, accessed on 6 March 2023)[38]. In brief, Proteasix retrieves information from literature and databases like MEROPs, UniProt Knoweldgebase (KB) and CutDB. The “Observed Prediction tool” of Proteasix with search parameters set to default, was utilized in this study. In addition, the relevant parental proteins corresponding to the statistically significant urinary peptides were subjected to network and pathway enrichment analysis utilizing the default settings of the online STRING database[39, 40] (http://www.string-db.org, accessed on 15 May 2023). The Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway database, which contains pathway maps representing the current understanding of molecular interaction and reaction networks, was utilized for enrichment analysis. Default settings were used, and pathways with a predicted significance of p-value < 0.05 (FDR) were considered statistically significant.
Results