To enable identification of medium-low abundant proteins, only samples with a total content of hemoglobin lower than 4.52 μg/mL were included in the study. Total hemoglobin absorbance and the resulting hemoglobin content were calculated for all the piglet sera in both discovery (n = 50) and validation (n = 70) phases of the study [Additional file 1: Table S1 and Additional file 2:  Table S2 , respectively].