One-year plasma N-linked glycome intra-individual and inter-individual variability in the chicken model of spontaneous ovarian adenocarcinoma

Abstract

Spontaneous epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) in the chicken presents a similar pathogenesis compared with humans including CA-125 expression and genetic mutational frequencies ( e.g., p53). The high prevalence of spontaneous EOC chickens also provides a unique experimental model for biomarker discovery at the genomic, proteomic, glycomic, and metabolomic level. In an effort to exploit this unique model for biomarker discovery, longitudinal plasma samples were collected from chickens at three-month intervals for one year. The study described herein involved cleaving the N-glycans from these longitudinal chicken plasma samples and analyzing them via nanoLC–FTMS/MS. Glycans identified in this study were previously found in human plasma and this work provides a promising methodology to enable longitudinal studies of the N-linked plasma glycome profile during EOC progression. The structure, abundance, and intra-variability and inter-variability for 35 N-linked glycans identified in this study are reported. The full potential of the chicken model for biomarker discovery has yet to be realized, but the initial interrogation of longitudinally-procured samples provides evidence that supports the value of this strategy in the search for glycomic biomarkers.