Secretome, the totality of secreted proteins, is viewed as a promising pool of candidate cancer biomarkers. Simple and reliable methods for identifying secreted proteins are highly desired. We used an optimized semi-shotgun liquid chromatography followed by tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) method to analyze the secretome of breast cancer cell line MDA-MB-231. A total of 464 proteins were identified. About 63% of the proteins were classified as secreted proteins, including many promising breast cancer biomarkers, which were thought to be correlated with tumorigenesis, tumor development and metastasis. These results suggest that the optimized method may be a powerful strategy for cell line secretome profiling, and can be used to find potential cancer biomarkers with great clinical significance.
TANG XiaorongYAO LingCHEN KeyingHU XiaofangXU Lisa X.FAN Chunhai
Tumor microvasculature is important to tumor growth, metastasis and thus tumor treatment outcome. The alternate cooling and heating treatment has been confirmed to have advantages over single treatment of cooling or heating. The degree of tumor microvasculature damage induced by the alternate cooling and heating treatment and the mechanisms underlying are studied in this paper. The response of the tumor microvasculature to different treatments including alternate cooling and heating is observed in vivo through confocal microscopy using the nude mice dorsal skin fold tumor chamber model. Results show that alternate cooling and heating has induced much more severe damage to the microvessel structure throughout the entire tumor. Numerical simulations of the mechanical stresses on the tumor vessel wall has found that during the alternate treatment, the vessel wall suffer a rapid chang in thermal stresses in the opposite directions successively, which might caused damage to the peripheral microvasculature and micro-cracks in the central vessels. Reperfusion of blood flow after freezing also led to relatively large stresses on the vessel wall, especially when blood flow re-perfuses quickly during the subsequent heating. The quick increase of stresses on the blood vessel might be one of the key issues causing the blood vessel rupture referring to the experimental observation. The preliminary study has partly revealed the mechanism underlying serious tumor microvasculature damage caused by the alternate cooling and heating treatment.
