**4. Conclusions**

In biomedical applications, a comparative approach is usually employed to identify proteins that are up and down regulated in a disease specific manner for use as diagnostic markers or therapeutic targets. This report represents an overview of the investigation at molecular level of myocarditis by using a proteomic approach .

Serum proteins (including the N-glycosylation sites profiling) and glycoproteins and free peptides occurring in human sera from healthy donors were compared to the ones from myocarditis patients. This procedure, allowed the identification of several N-glycosylation sites by a single-step proteomic approach, contemporarily probing an entire complex sample by LC-MS/MS. Thanks to the depletion of the serum most abundant proteins, we could detect some of the very weakly represented free peptides, whose presence is connected to the pathology itself. The high resolution, the sensitivity and the reproducibility of the used techniques led to the identification of some up regulated proteins in the serum from a myocarditis affected patient, all these proteins are connected to inflammatory events and one in particular (hemopexin) opens the way to new speculations in serum proteins as a specific marker for pathologic state.

 Finally, this proteomic approach represents a new opportunity for therapeutics and early diagnostics, for the screening of proteic biomarkers in pathological status. Finding a biomarker molecule that precisely indicates certain kind of pathology, is something quite difficult to achieve since it requires a huge background in many different fields of clinical investigation. Here we contribute with putative diagnostic species that could really be helpful for an early diagnosis myocarditis event.
