Seeing through the trick of cancer cells via 2D gels.

The advancement of modern therapy concepts has dramatically extended the postsurvival rates of patients with malignant gastric cancer. However, a remaining setback is the drug resistance of recurrent cancer, which casts a dark shadow over disease prognosis. The original work of Klein et al. [Proteomics Clin. Appl. 2013, 7, 813-824] has outlined a rational experimental approach to decipher the mechanistic pathway of cancer drug resistance by proteomic approach. They used gel-based comparative proteomics to analyze the nuclear proteome of a human gastric cancer cell line (AGS) with and without inactivation of hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF-1), a transcription factor and master regulator of hypoxia adaptation. Using the classical 2DE-MS approach, these researchers observed 163 HIF-1 responsive proteins, among which over half of them could be confidently identified by MS. From this large dataset, the authors proposed an enhanced nuclear translocation of some proteasomal proteins upon inactivation of HIF-1. Overall, this work appropriately used proteomics as a hypothesis-free, top-down approach to dissect imperative clinical problems.