Project description:Thyroid nodules occur in about 60% of the population. Current diagnostic strategies, however, often fail at distinguishing malignant nodules before surgery, thus leading to unnecessary, invasive treatments. As proteins are involved in all physio/pathological processes, a proteome investigation of biopsied nodules may help correctly classify and identify malignant nodules and discover therapeutic targets. Quantitative mass spectrometry data-independent acquisition (DIA) enables highly reproducible and rapid throughput investigation of proteomes. An exhaustive spectral library of thyroid nodules is essential for DIA yet still unavailable. This study presents a comprehensive thyroid spectral library covering five types of thyroid tissue: multinodular goiter, follicular adenoma, follicular and papillary thyroid carcinoma, and normal thyroid tissue. Our library includes 925,330 transition groups, 157,548 peptide precursors, 121,960 peptides, 9941 protein groups, and 9826 proteins from proteotypic peptides. This library resource was evaluated using three papillary thyroid carcinoma samples and their corresponding adjacent normal thyroid tissue, leading to effective quantification of up to 7863 proteins from biopsy-level thyroid tissues.
Project description:While thyroid nodules per se are frequent (4%–50%), thyroid cancer is rare (∼5% of all thyroid nodules). The minimally invasive Fine Needle Aspiration Cytology (FNAC) is the current gold standard for the diagnosis thyroid nodule malignancy. However, proper discrimination of follicular neoplasias often require more invasive diagnostic techniques. To develop a novel molecular classification system for thyroid cancer malignancy, we performed a genome-wide epigenetic profiling of 54 fresh frozen Follicular like thyroid samples using the Illumina Human DNA Methylation EPIC platform.
Project description:The study aimes to evaluate the neoplasm proteomic changes in benign follicular adenoma versus malignant follicular variant of papillary thyroid carcinoma. Tumor and non-tumor adjacent samples were analyzed by liquid nano-chromatography mass spectrometry and protein abundance was evaluated by label free quantification.
Project description:Polycomb CBX7 was stably expressed in embryonal carcinoma cells in order to identify target genes. The study was specifically geared toward unveiling gene targets that are susceptible to DNA hypermethylation in adult cancer. A number of CBX7 target tumor suppressor genes were thereby identified and used in further studies to characterize the mechanism surrounding CBX7 mediated gene suppression. Keywords: CBX7 target gene identification
Project description:Currently there is a lack of effective therapies which result in long-term durable response for patients presenting with anaplastic thyroid carcinoma (ATC), a very rare and lethal variant of thyroid cancer. ATC is resistant to chemotherapy, radiation, and targeted therapies currently available. In an effort to identify novel tumor-specific therapeutic targets, we performed high throughput gene array analysis screening numerous patient ATC tumor tissues, and compared their gene expression levels to matched and unmatched normal thyroid tissue samples. RNA was extracted from flash frozen patient tumor and normal samples. Gene array analysis was performed, and resulting expression levels were compared between normal and tumor samples.
Project description:Thyroid cancer is a common endocrine malignancy; however, its diagnosis is not straightforward. The current gold standard for diagnosing thyroid cancer is fine needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB), but when cytological analysis does not provide viable results or samples belong to less defined categories of diagnosis, patients are often referred to diagnostic surgery. Given that not all these nodules require removal, nor all of them are malignant, patients would not necessarily require surgery had the initial FNAB diagnosis been more conclusive. There is therefore a lack of reliable and specific biomarkers for thyroid cancer malignancy, that can complement and improve the current diagnosing methods. “Omics” approaches have gained much attention in the last decade in the field of biomarker discovery for diagnostic and prognostic characterization of various pathophysiological conditions. In this project, proteomics and metabolomics approaches were applied to the same thyroid nodules from patients with benign and malignant lesions. Tissue analysis provided several interesting biomarkers by both proteomics and metabolomics. The combination of these results demonstrated the high energetic and biomass demand of cancer cells, as well as a biomarker panel including 2 free peptides and 2 proteins with high sensitivity and specificity. Together, these results have contributed to increasing the knowledge of thyroid cancer phenotype and corresponding biochemical profiles, as well as providing potential biomarkers for malignancy, and improving diagnostic methodologies.
Project description:Polycomb CBX7 was stably expressed in embryonal carcinoma cells in order to identify target genes. The study was specifically geared toward unveiling gene targets that are susceptible to DNA hypermethylation in adult cancer. A number of CBX7 target tumor suppressor genes were thereby identified and used in further studies to characterize the mechanism surrounding CBX7 mediated gene suppression. Keywords: CBX7 target gene identification A cDNA encoding the ORF of polycomb CBX7 under the control of EF1alpha promoter was transfected into the Tera-2 embryonal carcinoma cell line. Empty vector was used to transfect control cells. The cells were subject to stable selection using puromycin and a pooled population of CBX7 overexpressing cells was established. Gene expression analysis was performed by comparing the gene expression profile of CBX7 cells to empty vector control cells.
Project description:We conduct an experiment where CBX7 is knocked down in 4 different cell lines: A549, H1299, K562 and THP-1. After culturing these cell lines for three days with or without knockdown of CBX7, we then perform RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) to assess the impact.
Project description:Thyroid carcinoma (TC) is generally associated with good prognosis, nevertheless no effective treatments are available for aggressive forms not cured by current therapies. We previously identified the coatomer protein complex zeta 1 (COPZ1), as a new putative therapeutic target for TC, since its depletion impairs the viability of tumor cells, leads to abortive autophagy, ER stress, unfolded protein response and apoptosis, and reduces the tumor growth of TC xenograft models. In this study, by combining genomic, proteomic and functional approaches, we provided evidence that COPZ1 silencing stimulates a type I IFN-mediated viral mimicry response, boosts the production of several inflammatory molecules and finally induces immunogenic cell death, which, in turn, promotes dendritic cell maturation and subsequent activation of T cells. Collectively, our findings support the notion that COPZ1 targeting can be exploited as a new strategy to kill cancer cells with the subsequent involvement of an anti-tumor immune response.