Project description:Despite the advancement of genomic classification of breast cancer, current clinical tests and treatment decisions are commonly based on protein level information. Formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue specimens are widely available and can be directly linked to extended clinical outcomes. We performed comprehensive proteomic profiling of 300 FFPE breast cancer surgical specimens, 75 of each PAM50 subtype, with linked clinical outcomes. Using our highly sensitive SP3-Clinical Tissue Proteomics platform, we quantified 4214 proteins across all 300 samples. The analysis identified a distinct proteomic group characterized by high expression of immune response proteins and favorable survival rates. Four clinically distinct proteomic clusters within samples classified as triple negative breast cancer by immunohistochemistry had features of “basal-immune hot”, “basal-immune cold”, “mesenchymal”, and “luminal androgen receptor”. Our proteomic analysis characterizes the heterogeneity of breast cancer in a clinically-applicable manner, identifies potential biomarkers and therapeutic targets, and provides a resource for clinical breast cancer classification.
Project description:Formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues are an invaluable resource for retrospective studies but protein extraction and subsequent sample processing steps have shown to be challenging for mass spectrometry (MS) analysis. Streamlined high-throughput sample preparation workflows are essential for efficient peptide extraction from complex clinical specimens such as fresh frozen tissues or FFPE. Overall, proteome analysis has gained significant improvements in the instrumentation, acquisition methods, sample preparation workflows and analysis pipelines yet even the most recent FFPE workflows remain complex and are not readily scalable. Here, we present an optimized workflow for Automated Sonication-free Acid-assisted Proteome (ASAP) extraction from FFPE sections. ASAP enables efficient protein extraction from FFPE specimens achieving similar proteome coverage as established methods using time in equipment-heavy sonication-based methods at reduced sample processing time. The broad applicability of ASAP on archived pediatric tumor FFPE specimens resulted in high-quality data with increased proteome coverage and quantitative reproducibility. Our study demonstrates the practicality and superiority of the ASAP workflow as a streamlined, time and cost-effective pipeline for high-throughput FFPE proteomics of clinical specimens.
Project description:Dysregulated proteolysis represents a hallmark of numerous diseases. In recent years, increasing number of studies has begun looking at the protein termini in hope to unveil the physiological and pathological functions of proteases in clinical research. However, the availability of cryopreserved tissue specimens is often limited. Alternatively, formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues offer an invaluable resource for clinical research. Pathologically relevant tissues are often stored as FFPE, which represent the most abundant resource of archived human specimens. In this study, we established a robust workflow to investigate native and protease-generated protein N-termini from FFPE specimens. We demonstrate a comparable N-terminomes of cryopreserved and formalin fixed tissue, thereby showing that formalin fixation / paraffin embedment does not proteolytically damage proteins. Accordingly, FFPE specimens are fully amenable to N-terminal analysis. Moreover, we demonstrate feasibility of FFPE-degradomics in a quantitative N-terminomic study of FFPE liver specimens from cathepsin L deficient or wild-type mice. Using a machine learning approach in combination with the previously determined cathepsin L specificity, we successfully identified a number of potential cathepsin L cleavage sites. Our study establishes FFPE specimens as a valuable alternative to cryopreserved tissues for degradomic studies.
Project description:The majority of clinical cancer specimens are preserved as formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) samples. In order for clinical molecular tests to have wide reaching impact, they must be applicable to FFPE material. Accurate quantitative measurements of RNA derived from FFPE specimens is challenging due to low yields and high amounts of degradation. Here we present FFPEcap-seq, a method specifically designed for sequencing capped 5’ ends of RNA derived from FFPE samples. FFPEcap-seq combines enzymatic enrichment of 5’ capped RNAs with template switching to create sequencing libraries. We find that FFPEcap-seq can faithfully capture mRNA expression levels in FFPE specimens while also detecting enhancer RNAs that arise from distal regulatory regions. FFPEcap-seq is a fast and straightforward method for making high quality 5’ end RNA-seq libraries from FFPE-derived RNA.
Project description:This experiment contains the RNA-Seq samples only. Formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues are an invaluable resource for clinical research. However, nucleic acids extracted from FFPE tissues are fragmented and chemically modified making them challenging to use in molecular studies. We analysed 23 fresh-frozen (FF), 35 FFPE and 38 paired FF/FFPE specimens, representing six different human tissue types (bladder, prostate and colon carcinoma; liver and colon normal tissue; reactive tonsil) in order to examine the potential use of FFPE samples in next-generation sequencing (NGS) based retrospective and prospective clinical studies. Two methods for DNA and three methods for RNA extraction from FFPE tissues were compared and were found to affect nucleic acid quantity and quality. DNA and RNA from selected FFPE and paired FF/FFPE specimens were used for exome and transcriptome analysis. Preparations of DNA Exome-Seq libraries was more challenging (29.5 % success) than that of RNA-Seq libraries, presumably because of modifications to FFPE tissue-derived DNA. Libraries could still be prepared from RNA isolated from two-decade old FFPE tissues. Data were analysed using the CLC Bio Genomics Workbench and revealed systematic differences between FF and FFPE tissue-derived nucleic acid libraries. In spite of this, pairwise analysis of DNA Exome-Seq data showed concordance for 70-80 % of variants in FF and FFPE samples stored for fewer than three years. RNA-Seq data showed high correlation of expression profiles in FF/FFPE pairs (Pearson Correlations of 0.90 +/- 0.05), irrespective of storage time (up to 244 months) and tissue type. A common set of 1,494 genes was identified with expression profiles that were significantly different between paired FF and FFPE samples irrespective of tissue type. Our results are promising and suggest that NGS can be used to study FFPE specimens in both prospective and retrospective archive-based studies in which FF specimens are not available.
Project description:: A major challenge to the study of tumor DNA copy number (CN) in clinical specimens is the lack of appropriate fresh frozen samples and thus a dependence on Formalin-Fixed Paraffin Embedded (FFPE) banked samples, which typically have more extensive clinical follow up information. However, on most high density CN platforms, DNA from FFPE tissues generally underperforms or suffers high failure rates compared to fresh frozen samples because of DNA degradation and cross-linking. Molecular Inversion Probe (MIP) technology has been applied successfully to obtain high quality CN and genotype data from DNA isolated from cell lines and frozen tumor samples. Since the MIP probes require only a small (~40 bp) target binding site, we reasoned they may be well suited to assess FFPE samples. In this study, we successfully applied MIP technology with a panel of 50,000 markers to CN determination in FFPE samples. Using an input of 37 ng genomic DNA, we demonstrated high quali ty CN data with MIP technology from 93 FFPE samples from seven diverse collections. We found that the performance of FFPE DNA for CN determination was comparable to that of DNA obtained from matched frozen tumor, with only a modest loss in performance of DNA.
Project description:A major challenge to the study of tumor DNA copy number (CN) in clinical specimens is the lack of appropriate fresh frozen samples and thus a dependence on Formalin-Fixed Paraffin Embedded (FFPE) banked samples, which typically have more extensive clinical follow up information. However, on most high density CN platforms, DNA from FFPE tissues generally underperforms or suffers high failure rates compared to fresh frozen samples because of DNA degradation and cross-linking. Molecular Inversion Probe (MIP) technology has been applied successfully to obtain high quality CN and genotype data from DNA isolated from cell lines and frozen tumor samples. Since the MIP probes require only a small (~40 bp) target binding site, we reasoned they may be well suited to assess FFPE samples. In this study, we successfully applied MIP technology with a panel of 50,000 markers to CN determination in FFPE samples. Using an input of 37 ng genomic DNA, we demonstrated high quali ty CN data with MIP technology from 93 FFPE samples from seven diverse collections. We found that the performance of FFPE DNA for CN determination was comparable to that of DNA obtained from matched frozen tumor, with only a modest loss in performance of DNA.
Project description:A major challenge to the study of tumor DNA copy number (CN) in clinical specimens is the lack of appropriate fresh frozen samples and thus a dependence on Formalin-Fixed Paraffin Embedded (FFPE) banked samples, which typically have more extensive clinical follow up information. However, on most high density CN platforms, DNA from FFPE tissues generally underperforms or suffers high failure rates compared to fresh frozen samples because of DNA degradation and cross-linking. Molecular Inversion Probe (MIP) technology has been applied successfully to obtain high quality CN and genotype data from DNA isolated from cell lines and frozen tumor samples. Since the MIP probes require only a small (~40 bp) target binding site, we reasoned they may be well suited to assess FFPE samples. In this study, we successfully applied MIP technology with a panel of 50,000 markers to CN determination in FFPE samples. Using an input of 37 ng genomic DNA, we demonstrated high quali ty CN data with MIP technology from 93 FFPE samples from seven diverse collections. We found that the performance of FFPE DNA for CN determination was comparable to that of DNA obtained from matched frozen tumor, with only a modest loss in performance of DNA
Project description:A major challenge to the study of tumor DNA copy number (CN) in clinical specimens is the lack of appropriate fresh frozen samples and thus a dependence on Formalin-Fixed Paraffin Embedded (FFPE) banked samples, which typically have more extensive clinical follow up information. However, on most high density CN platforms, DNA from FFPE tissues generally underperforms or suffers high failure rates compared to fresh frozen samples because of DNA degradation and cross-linking. Molecular Inversion Probe (MIP) technology has been applied successfully to obtain high quality CN and genotype data from DNA isolated from cell lines and frozen tumor samples. Since the MIP probes require only a small (~40 bp) target binding site, we reasoned they may be well suited to assess FFPE samples. In this study, we successfully applied MIP technology with a panel of 50,000 markers to CN determination in FFPE samples. Using an input of 37 ng genomic DNA, we demonstrated high quali ty CN data with MIP technology from 93 FFPE samples from seven diverse collections. We found that the performance of FFPE DNA for CN determination was comparable to that of DNA obtained from matched frozen tumor, with only a modest loss in performance of DNA.
Project description:A major challenge to the study of tumor DNA copy number (CN) in clinical specimens is the lack of appropriate fresh frozen samples and thus a dependence on Formalin-Fixed Paraffin Embedded (FFPE) banked samples, which typically have more extensive clinical follow up information. However, on most high density CN platforms, DNA from FFPE tissues generally underperforms or suffers high failure rates compared to fresh frozen samples because of DNA degradation and cross-linking. Molecular Inversion Probe (MIP) technology has been applied successfully to obtain high quality CN and genotype data from DNA isolated from cell lines and frozen tumor samples. Since the MIP probes require only a small (~40 bp) target binding site, we reasoned they may be well suited to assess FFPE samples. In this study, we successfully applied MIP technology with a panel of 50,000 markers to CN determination in FFPE samples. Using an input of 37 ng genomic DNA, we demonstrated high quali ty CN data with MIP technology from 93 FFPE samples from seven diverse collections. We found that the performance of FFPE DNA for CN determination was comparable to that of DNA obtained from matched frozen tumor, with only a modest loss in performance of DNA.