Comparative Analysis of the Protein Profiles from Primary Gastric Tumors and Their Adjacent Regions: MAWBP Could Be a New Protein Candidate Involved in Gastric Cancer

The study of tumor biomarkers is generally facilitated by the adoption of proteomic strategies. With
limitations of techniques and individual varieties of biological samples, the biomarkers for gastric cancer
(GC) have not reached a common agreement derived from the proteomic investigations. Herein, we
reported a new set of data for screening the biomarkers from the gastric tissues, on the basis of the
proteomic strategy developed in our laboratory. Ten pairs of the clinic samples were collected and
treated with protein extraction. The gastric proteins were well-resolved by 2-DE, and the GC-associated
proteins were identified by MALDI-TOF/TOF MS following image analysis, including 12 up-regulated
and 13 down-regulated unique ones. MAWBP was found to be one of the new GC proteins which
appeared with lower expression in the GC tissues. We expanded a systematical examination to deeply
pursue the relevance between MAWBP and GC. Quantitatively, we measured the expression of MAWBP
with Western blot and Real-Time PCR. Extendedly, we estimated the existence of MAWBP with
immunohistochemical staining in a large number of the GC cases. Specifically, we inquired whether
MAWD, a protein with high affinity to MAWBP, could coexpress and interact with MAWBP in vivo. On
the basis of all the results, we concluded that MAWBP could be a new GC-related protein even though
its physiological roles remain unexplored.
Keywords: Gastric cancer • MAWBP • MAWD • proteomics • tissue microarray