Proteomics study of Mongolian medicine warm acupuncture in the treatment of insomnia

Warm acupuncture therapy is a traditional external therapy method that has a definite clinical effect in the treatment of insomnia, but the underlying neural molecules regulation research remains limited. iTRAQ-based quantitative proteomics to find proteins that are potential neural molecules involved in the treatment of insomnia by Mongolian medical warm acupuncture. In this study, 6383 proteins were identified, including 45 proteins with increased expression and 31 proteins with decreased expression in M compared to C, 101 proteins showed an increase and 48 proteins showed a decrease from W compared to C, 26 proteins showed an increase and 22 proteins showed a decrease from W compared to M. GO and KEGG analysis showed that warm acupuncture treatment of insomnia was closely related to metabolism and hormone synthesis. Different expression proteins showed that increase/decrease expression included albumin (ALB), Pro-MCH (PMCH), Acetoacetyl-CoA synthetase (AACS), N-ethylmaleimide sensitive factor NSF (NSF), Potassium/sodium hyperpolarization-activated cyclic-nucleotide gated channel 4 (HCN4) and Anamorsin (Ciapin1) would be the important proteins for warm acupuncture to treat insomnia. The iTRAQ-based proteomics data analyses presented here elucidate variations of the proteomics involved in the treatment of insomnia by Mongolian medical warm acupuncture.