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