Identification of a Novel Splice Variant of Neural Cell Adhesion Molecule in Glioblastoma Through Proteogenomics...

Splice variants are known to be important in the pathophysiology of tumors, including the brain cancers. We applied a proteogenomics pipeline to identify splice variants in glioblastoma (GBM, grade IV glioma), a highly malignant brain tumor, using in-house generated mass spectrometric proteomic data and public domain RNASeq dataset. Our analysis led to the identification of a novel exon that maps to the long isoform of Neural cell adhesion molecule 1 (NCAM1), expressed on the surface of glial cells and neurons, important for cell adhesion and cell signaling. The presence of the novel exon is supported with the identification of five peptides spanning it. Additional peptides were also detected in sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) gel separated proteins from GBM patient tissue, underscoring the presence of the novel peptides in the intact brain protein. The novel exon was detected in the RNASeq dataset in 18 of 25 GBM samples and separately validated in additional 10 GBM tumor tissues using quantitative real-time-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). Both transcriptomic and proteomic data indicate downregulation of NCAM1, including the novel variant, in GBM. Domain analysis of the novel NCAM1 sequence indicates that the insertion of the novel exon contributes extra low-complexity region in the protein that may be important for protein-protein interactions and hence for cell signaling associated with tumor development. Taken together, the novel NCAM1 variant reported in this study exemplifies the importance of future multiomics research and systems biology applications in GBM.