Analysis of Human Breast Tumors by Integrated Proteotranscriptomics

We generated large-scale proteome data for 65 human breast tumors and 53 paired adjacent non-cancerous tissue and performed an integrated proteotranscriptomic characterization. To our best knowledge, the study is one of the largest quantitative proteomic study of human breast tissues, including the analysis of 118 tissue samples from 65 patients with long-term survival outcomes. Our data show that protein expression describes a tumor biology that is only partly captured by the transcriptome, with mRNA abundance incompletely predicting protein abundance in tumors, and even less so in non-cancerous tissue. Furthermore, the tumor proteome described disease pathways and subgroups that were only partially captured by the tumor transcriptome.

本研究针对65例人类乳腺肿瘤与53例配对癌旁正常组织生成了大规模蛋白质组（proteome）数据，并完成了整合蛋白质组-转录组学（proteotranscriptomic）表征分析。据我们所知，本研究是当前针对人类乳腺组织开展的规模最大的定量蛋白质组学研究之一，共纳入65例患者的118份组织样本进行分析，并附带长期生存结局数据。本研究数据表明，蛋白质表达所刻画的肿瘤生物学特征仅能被转录组（transcriptome）部分捕获；在肿瘤组织中，mRNA丰度无法完全预测蛋白质丰度，而在癌旁正常组织中，这一预测缺陷更为突出。此外，肿瘤蛋白质组所揭示的疾病通路与亚型特征，也仅能被肿瘤转录组部分捕捉。