Towards an integrated proteomic and glycomic approach to finding cancer biomarkers
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* Corresponding author: Samir M Hanash shanash@fhcrc.org
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
Genome Med 2009, 1:57 doi:10.1186/gm57
Published: 4 June 2009Abstract
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.