Comprehensive proteomic characterization identifies potential molecular targets for therapy and imaging in the Cluster 1 human pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma

In order to identify new proteins with a potential to become targets for therapy or tumor imaging in pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma, we performed detailed proteomic analysis of 22 well-characterized human PPGL samples and normal chromaffin tissue from adrenal medulla. A standard quantitative proteomic analysis of tumor tissue was accompanied by specific membrane proteome-aimed methods, namely glycopeptide capture using lectin-affinity (Zielinska 2010) or hydrazide chemistry (Tian 2007) and enrichment of membrane-embedded hydrophobic transmembrane segment (Vit et al 2016 ). The parallel application of these complementary methods recently presented as “Pitchfork strategy”, enables deep quantitative profiling of human membrane proteomes without sacrificing the information on soluble non-membrane proteins (Vit et al 2019).