American Chemical Society, Journal of Proteome Research, 4(13), p. 2197-2204, 2014
DOI: 10.1021/pr401061c
Full text: Download
Altered glycosylation in glycoproteins is associated with carcinogenesis, and certain glycan structures and glycoproteins are well-known markers for tumor progression. To identify potential diagnostic candidate markers, we have developed a novel method for analysis of glycosylation changes of glycoproteins from crude serum samples, using lectin-based glycoprotein capture followed by detection with biotin/HRP-conjugated antibodies. The amount of lectin coated on the microplate well was optimized to achieve low background and improved S/N compared to current lectin ELISA methods. In the presence of competing sugars of lectin AAL, or with sialic acid removed from the glycoproteins, we confirmed that this method specifically detects glycosylation changes of proteins rather than protein abundance variation. Using our reverse lectin-based ELISA assay, increased fucosylated haptoglobin was observed in sera of patients with ovarian cancer, while the protein level of haptoglobin remained the same between cancers and non-cases. The combination of fucosylated haptoglobin and CA125 (AUC=0.88) showed improved performance for distinguishing stage III ovarian cancer from non-cases compared to CA125 alone (AUC=0.86). In differentiating early stage ovarian cancer from non-cases, fucosylated haptoglobin showed comparable performance to CA125. The combination of CA125 and fucosylated haptoglobin resulted in an AUC of 0.855, which outperforms CA125 to distinguish early stage cancer from non-cases. Our study provides an alternative method to quantify glycosylation changes of proteins from serum samples which will be essential for biomarker discovery and validation studies.