Abstract
Being the fourth leading cause of cancer-related death, glial tumors are highly diverse tumor entities characterized by important heterogeneity regarding tumor malignancy and prognosis. However, despite the identification of important alterations in the genome of the glial tumors, there remains a gap in understanding the mechanisms involved in glioma malignancy. Previous research focused on decoding the genomic alterations in these tumors, but due to intricate cellular mechanisms, the genomic findings do not correlate with the functional proteins expressed at the cellular level. The development of mass spectrometry (MS) based proteomics allowed researchers to study proteins expressed at the cellular level or in serum that may provide new insights on the proteins involved in the proliferation, invasiveness, metastasis and resistance to therapy in glial tumors. The integration of data provided by genomic and proteomic approaches into clinical practice could allow for the identification of new predictive, diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers that will improve the clinical management of patients with glial tumors. This paper aims to provide an updated review of the recent proteomic findings, possible clinical applications, and future research perspectives in diffuse astrocytic and oligodendroglial tumors, pilocytic astrocytomas, and ependymomas.
Highlights
Diffuse astrocytic and oligodendroglial tumors are a heterogeneous group of primary brain tumors with significant differences regarding tumor malignancy and prognosis [1]
Proteomic technologies have the potential to improve our understanding of the intrinsic mechanisms and to uncover pathways and means of communication between tumor cells, the microenvironment, and the organism by adding a new perspective on the molecular landscape of brain tumors
The mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomic approaches enabled the characterization of the proteome of glial tumors
Summary
Diffuse astrocytic and oligodendroglial tumors are a heterogeneous group of primary brain tumors with significant differences regarding tumor malignancy and prognosis [1]. For a more comprehensive understanding of the biological processes that take place in glial tumor cells, we need to fill the gap between known genomic alterations and the proteomic pattern of gliomas in order to identify reliable predictive, diagnostic, and prognostic biomarkers [7]. The results are typically presented as a mass spectrum, a plot of intensity as a function of the mass-to-charge ratio It offers the possibility of identifying multiple proteins based on their molecular mass [8]. When two or more peptides have the same m/z ratio but could have different primary sequences, for an improved identification, parent ions will be selected for fragmentation, and the MS/MS spectra will be recorded. The aim of this review is to provide updates on the recent discoveries using classic and modern proteomic technologies, and to provide future research perspectives on glial tumors using MS approaches, focusing on clinically promising proteins involved in the pathogenesis of gliomas
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