Normal variations in human tear protein composition

In this study, a quantitative proteomic method was used to analyze variations in the tear protein profiles of healthy volunteers. High day-to-day and inter-eye personal variances were observed in the tear volumes, protein content and composition of the tear samples. Several normalization and outlier exclusion approaches were evaluated to decrease variances. Despite the intrapersonal variances, statistically significant differences and cluster analysis revealed that proteome profile and immunoglobulin composition of tear fluid present personal characteristics. Using correlation analysis we could identify several correlating protein clusters, mainly related to source of the proteins. LC-MS data files. Search results: https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10498288