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Towards an integrated proteomic and glycomic approach to finding cancer biomarkers

Allen D Taylor1, William S Hancock2, Marina Hincapie2, Naoyuki Taniguchi43 and Samir M Hanash1*

Author Affiliations

1 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, 1100 Fairview Avenue North, Seattle, WA 98109, USA

2 Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Barnett Institute, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA

3 Systems Glycobiology Group, Disease Glycomics Team, Advanced Science Institute, RIKEN, Japan

4 Department of Disease Glycomics, Research Institute for Microbial Diseases, Osaka, Japan


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Genome Medicine 2009, 1:57 doi:10.1186/gm57

Published: 4 June 2009

Abstract

Advances in mass spectrometry have had a great impact on the field of proteomics. A major challenge of proteomic analysis has been the elucidation of glycan modifications of proteins in complex proteomes. Glycosylation is the most structurally elaborate and diverse type of protein post-translational modification and, because of this, proteomics and glycomics have largely developed independently. However, given that such a large proportion of proteins contain glycan modifications, and that these may be important for their function or may produce biologically relevant protein variation, a convergence of the fields of glycomics and proteomics would be highly desirable. Here we review the current status of glycoproteomic efforts, focusing on the identification of glycoproteins as cancer biomarkers.