Mitochondrial proteomics analysis of tumorigenic and metastatic breast cancer markers

Mitochondria are key organelles in mammary cells responsible for several cellular functions including growth, division, and energy metabolism. In this study, mitochondrial proteins were enriched for proteomics analysis with the state-of-the-art two-dimensional differential gel electrophoresis and matrix-assistant laser desorption ionization-time-of-flight mass spectrometry strategy to compare and identify the mitochondrial protein profiling changes between three breast cell lines with different tumorigenicity and metastasis. The proteomics results demonstrate more than 1,500 protein features were resolved from the equal amount pooled from three purified mitochondrial proteins, and 125 differentially expressed spots were identified by their peptide finger print, in which, 33 identified proteins belonged to mitochondrial proteins. Eighteen out of these 33 identified mitochondrial proteins such as SCaMC-1 have not been reported in breast cancer research to our knowledge. Additionally, mitochondrial protein prohibitin has shown to be differentially distributed in mitochondria and in nucleus for normal breast cells and breast cancer cell lines, respectively. To sum up, our approach to identify the mitochondrial proteins in various stages of breast cancer progression and the identified proteins may be further evaluated as potential breast cancer markers in prognosis and therapy.