Mass Spectrometry-Based Glycoproteomics and Prostate Cancer

Abstract

Aberrant glycosylation has long been known to be associated with cancer, since it is involved in key mechanisms such as tumour onset, development and progression. This review will focus on protein glycosylation studies in cells, tissue, urine and serum in the context of prostate cancer. A dedicated section will cover the glycoforms of prostate specific antigen, the molecule that, despite some important limitations, is routinely tested for helping prostate cancer diagnosis. Our aim is to provide readers with an overview of mass spectrometry-based glycoproteomics of prostate cancer. From this perspective, the first part of this review will illustrate the main strategies for glycopeptide enrichment and mass spectrometric analysis. The molecular information obtained by glycoproteomic analysis performed by mass spectrometry has led to new insights into the mechanism linking aberrant glycosylation to cancer cell proliferation, migration and immunoescape.

Keywords: PSA; SPEG; TiO2; biomarker discovery; glycocapture; protein glycosylation.

Figure 1

Bottom-up approach.

Figure 2

This figure is a simple representation of the enrichment methods.

Figure 3

Advantages and disadvantages for each sample type.

Figure 4

This figure shows the correlation between the alteration of tissue architecture and the increase of serum levels of PSA in PCa.