Ion exchange- and enrichment-based technology applied to large-scale plasma proteomic analysis of breast cancer...

Mass spectrometry (MS) based proteomics provides unbiased quantification of all proteins in plasma, which can dynamically reflect individual health states in real time. However, large-scale proteomics studies are constrained by the excessive dynamic range of plasma proteome and low throughput. Herein, two kinds of magnetic metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) modified with ion exchange functional groups (denoted as MHP-UiO-66-SAX and MHP-HKUST-1-SCX) were designed and fabricated to exhibit large protein adsorption capability, which were combined with an automated Liquid-handling System, thus realizing in-depth, high-throughput and automated proteomics studies. The constructed workflow could automatically complete the sample preparation before MS within only six hours and nearly a thousand protein groups per sample could be quantified. In the cohort study of nearly one hundred breast cancer neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NC) plasma samples, two differentially expressed proteins previously reported as biomarkers were related with the pathological complete response (PCR) of the breast cancer, demonstrating the feasibility of the developed technology for preparing large-scale clinical samples and exhibiting the potential application in monitoring the effect of chemotherapy.