Neuronal differentiation of LUHMES cells is accompanied by substantial changes of the proteome

To study mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases, neuronal cell lines are important model systems and are often differentiated into postmitotic neuron-like cells to resemble more closely primary neurons obtained from brains. One such cell line is the Lund Human Mesencephalic (LUHMES) cell line which can be differentiated into dopamine-like neurons and is frequently used to study mechanisms of Parkinson’s disease (PD) and neurotoxicity. Neuronal differentiation of LUHMES cells is commonly verified by measurement of selected neuronal markers, but little is known about proteome-wide protein abundance changes during differentiation. Using mass spectrometry and label-free quantification (LFQ) we compared the proteome of differentiated and undifferentiated LUHMES cells as well as of cultured primary murine midbrain neurons, which are mainly dopaminergic. Neuronal differentiation induced substantial changes of the LUHMES cell proteome (18.4% reveal protein abundance changes of more than 4-fold), with proliferation-related proteins (e.g. MCMs) being strongly down-regulated and neuronal and dopaminergic proteins being up to 1000-fold upregulated, such as L1CAM and SNCA. Several of these proteins, including MAPT and SYN1, may be useful new markers to experimentally validate neuronal differentiation of cultured LUHMES cells. Primary midbrain neurons were more closely related to differentiated than to undifferentiated LUHMES cells with respect to the abundance of proteins related to neurodegeneration or to genetic forms of PD. In summary, our comparative proteomic analysis demonstrates that differentiated LUHMES cells are a suitable model for studies on PD and neurodegeneration and provides a resource of the proteome-wide changes during neuronal differentiation.