Integrated Proteomics analysis of baseline protein expression in pig tissues

The availability of an increasingly large amount of public proteomics datasets presents an opportunity for performing combined analyses to generate comprehensive organism-wide protein expression maps across different organisms and biological conditions. Sus scrofa, the domestic pig, is a model organism relevant for food production and for human biomedical research. Here we reanalyzed 14 public proteomics datasets from the PRIDE database coming from pig tissues to assess baseline (without any biological perturbation) protein abundance in 14 organs, encompassing a total of 20 healthy tissues from 128 samples. The analysis involved the quantification of protein abundance in 599 mass spectrometry runs. We compared protein expression patterns among different pig organs and examined the distribution of proteins across these organs. Then, we studied how protein abundances compared across different datasets and studied the tissue specificity of the detected proteins. Of particular interest, we conducted a comparative analysis of protein expression between pig and human tissues, revealing a high degree of correlation in protein expression among orthologs, particularly in brain, kidney, heart, and liver samples. We have integrated the protein expression results into the Expression Atlas resource for easy access and visualisation of the protein expression data individually or alongside gene expression data.