Proteomics
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Oral cavity squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC), which is frequently associated with poor prognosis and mortality, is a leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Discovery of body fluid accessible biomarkers is needed to improve OSCC screening. To this end, we profiled proteomes of saliva from the healthy volunteers, the individuals with oral potentially malignant disorders (OPMD), and the OSCC patients by means of SDS-PAGE coupled with LC-MS/MS. ⋯ The data confirmed that the salivary RETN levels in the OSCC patients were significantly higher than that in the healthy or in the OPMD group. Moreover, the elevated levels of salivary RETN were highly correlated with late-stage primary tumors, advanced overall stage, and lymph-node metastasis. Our results not only reveal that profiling of saliva proteome is feasible for discovery of OSCC biomarkers, but also identify RETN as a potential salivary biomarker for OSCC detection.
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As high-throughput techniques including proteomics become more accessible to individual laboratories, there is an urgent need for a user-friendly bioinformatics analysis system. Here, we describe FunRich, an open access, standalone functional enrichment and network analysis tool. FunRich is designed to be used by biologists with minimal or no support from computational and database experts. ⋯ In addition to proteomics datasets, the custom database allows for the tool to be used for genomics, lipidomics and metabolomics datasets. Thus, FunRich allows for complete database customization and thereby permits for the tool to be exploited as a skeleton for enrichment analysis irrespective of the data type or organism used. FunRich (http://www.funrich.org) is user-friendly and provides graphical representation (Venn, pie charts, bar graphs, column, heatmap and doughnuts) of the data with customizable font, scale and color (publication quality).
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Many top-down proteomics experiments focus on identifying and localizing PTMs and other potential sources of “mass shift” on a known protein sequence. A simple application to match ion masses and facilitate the iterative hypothesis testing of PTM presence and location would assist with the data analysis in these experiments. ProSight Lite is a free software tool for matching a single candidate sequence against a set of mass spectrometric observations. ⋯ The application reports multiple scores and a matching fragment list. Fragmentation maps can be exported for publication in either portable network graphic (PNG) or scalable vector graphic (SVG) format. ProSight Lite can be freely downloaded from http://prosightlite.northwestern.edu, installs and updates from the web, and requires Windows 7 or a higher version.
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Plants are sessile organisms that need to respond to environmental changes quickly and efficiently. They can accomplish this by triggering specialized signaling pathways often mediated by protein phosphorylation and dephosphorylation. ⋯ Advances in the technologies allow simultaneous identification and quantification of thousands of phosphopeptides and proteins that are essential to understanding the sophisticated biological systems and regulations. In this review, we summarize the advances in phosphopeptide enrichment and quantitation, MS for phosphorylation site mapping and new data acquisition methods, databases and informatics, interpretation of biological insights and crosstalk with other PTMs, as well as future directions and challenges in the field of phosphoproteomics.
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Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia, characterized by progressive loss of cognitive function. One of the pathological hallmarks of AD is the formation of neurofibrillary tangles composed of abnormally hyperphosphorylated tau protein, but global deregulation of protein phosphorylation in AD is not well analyzed. Here, we report a pilot investigation of AD phosphoproteome by titanium dioxide enrichment coupled with high resolution LC-MS/MS. ⋯ This modified enrichment method is simple and highly efficient. The AD case study demonstrates its feasibility of dissecting phosphoproteome in a limited amount of postmortem human brain. All MS data have been deposited in the ProteomeXchange with identifier PXD001180 (http://proteomecentral.proteomexchange.org/dataset/PXD001180).