Loss of clusterin both in serum and tissue correlates with the tumorigenesis of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma via proteomics approaches

AIM: To identify the differentially secreted proteins or polypeptides associated with tumorigenesis of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) from serum and to find potential tumor secreted biomarkers.METHODS: Proteins from human ESCC tissue and its matched adjacent normal tissue; pre-surgery and postsurgery serum; and pre-surgery and normal control serum were separated by two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE)to identify differentially expressed proteins. The silverstained 2-DE were scanned with digital ImageScanner and analyzed with ImageMaster 2D Elite 3.10 software. A cluster of protein spots differentially expressed were selected and identified with matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF-MS). One of the differentially expressed proteins, clusterin, was downregulated in cancer tissue and pre-surgery serum, but it was reversed in post-surgery serum. The results were confirmed by semi-quantitative reverse-transcription (RT)-PCR and western blot.RESULTS: Comparisons of the protein spots identified on the 2-DE maps from human matched sera showed that some proteins were differentially expressed, with most of them showing no differences in composition, shape or density.Being analyzed by MALDI-TOF-MS and database searching,clusterin was differentially expressed and down-regulated in both cancer tissue and pre-surgery serum compared with their counterparts. The results were also validated by RTPCR and western blot.CONCLUSION: The differentially expressed clusterin may play a key role during tumorigenesis of ESCC. The 2DE-MS based proteomic approach is one of the powerful tools for discovery of secreted markers from peripheral.

A Real-Time and Dynamic Biological Information Retrieval and Analysis System(BIRAS)

The aim of this study is to design a biological information retrieval and analysis system (BIRAS) based on the Internet. Using the specific network protocol, BIRAS system could send and receive information from the Entrez search and retrieval system maintained by National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in USA. The literatures, nucleotide sequence, protein sequences, and other resources according to the user-defined term could then be retrieved and sent to the user by pop up message or by E-mail informing automatically using BIRAS system. All the information retrieving and analyzing processes are done in real-time. As a robust system for intelligently and dynamically retrieving and analyzing on the user-defined information, it is believed that BIRAS would be extensively used to retrieve specific information from large amount of biological databases in now days. The program is available on request from the corresponding author.