The proteomic and metabolomic characterization of exercise-induced sweat for human performance monitoring: A pilot investigation
Open accessAbstract
Sweat is a biofluid with several attractive attributes. However, investigation into sweat for biomarker discovery applications is still in its infancy. To add support for the use of sweat as a non-invasive media for human performance monitoring, volunteer participants were subjected to a physical exertion model using a treadmill. Following exercise, sweat was collected, aliquotted, and analyzed for metabolite and protein content via high-resolution mass spectrometry. Overall, the proteomic analysis illustrates significant enrichment steps will be required for proteomic biomarker discovery from single sweat samples as protein abundance is low in this medium. Furthermore, the results indicate a potential for protein degradation, or a large number of low molecular weight protein/peptides, in these samples. Metabolomic analysis shows a strong correlation in the overall abundance among sweat metabolites. Finally, hierarchical clustering of participant metabolite abundances show trends emerging, although no significant trends were observed (alpha = 0.8, lambda = 1 standard error via cross validation). However, these data suggest with a greater number of biological replicates, stronger, statistically significant results, can be obtained. Collectively, this study represents the first to simultaneously use both proteomic and metabolomic analysis to investigate sweat. These data highlight several pitfalls of sweat analysis for biomarker discovery applications.
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The number of sweat glands and sweat rate might differ at each side of the body, but they seem to mostly affect sweat ions (excluding ions like Na+) with minimal effect on other biomarkers.
“Although the number of sweat glands and sweat rate might differ at each side of the body, they seem to mostly affect the sweat ions (excluding ions like Na+)[ 28 ] with a minimal effect on other biomarkers.”
From MicroSweat: A wearable microfluidic patch for noninvasive and reliable sweat collection enables human stress monitoring (2023) · cites this paper as [28]
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Cites
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A wireless patch for the monitoring of C-reactive protein in sweat
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Metabolomic stability of exercise-induced sweat
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- Authors
- Harshman, S. W., Pitsch, R. L., Smith, Z. K., O’Connor, M. L., Geier, B. A., Qualley, A. V., Schaeublin, N. M., Fischer, M. V., Eckerle, J. J., Strang, A. J., & Martin, J. A.
- Affiliations
- United States Air Force Research Laboratory (US)
- Corresponding author
- Harshman, Sean W.
- ORCID
- Venue
- PLOS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2018-11-01
- Volume
- 13
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- e0203133
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC6211630
- OpenAlex
- W2898962197
- Cited by
- 51
- References
- 11
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 3 · 2018: 1
- FWCI
- 1.78
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- public-domain
- creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (vor)
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, public-domain)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, public-domain)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, public-domain)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- U.S. Air Force
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Metabolomics and Mass Spectrometry Studies
- Physical Sciences › Chemistry › Spectroscopy › Advanced Proteomics Techniques and Applications
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Biomedical Engineering › Advanced Chemical Sensor Technologies
- Keywords
- sweat, physical activity, human performance monitoring, biomarker discovery, non-invasive biomarkers, treadmill exercise, protein degradation, metabolite abundance, hierarchical clustering
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Adult, Humans, Middle Aged, Military Personnel, Physical Endurance, Pilot Projects, Sweat, Exercise, Proteome, Proteomics, Metabolomics, Metabolome, Young Adult
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