Loss of Potential Biomarker Proteins Associated with Abundant Proteins during Abundant Protein Removal in Sample Pretreatment

Capture of non-glycoproteins during lectin affinity chromatography is frequently observed, although it would seem to be anomalous. In actuality, lectin affinity chromatography works at post-translational modification (PTM) sites on a glycoprotein which is not involved in protein-protein interactions (PPIs). In this study, serial affinity column set (SACS) using lectins followed by proteomics methods was used to identify PPI mechanisms of captured proteins in human plasma. MetaCore, STRING, Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA), and IntAct were individually used to elucidate the interactions of the identified abundant proteins and to obtain the corresponding interaction maps. The abundant non-glycoproteins were captured with the binding to the selected glycoproteins. Therefore, depletion process in sample pretreatment for abundant protein removal should be considered with more caution because it may lose precious disease-related low abundant proteins through PPIs of the removed abundant proteins in human plasma during the depletion process in biomarker discovery. Glycoproteins bearing specific glycans are frequently associated with cancer and can be specifically isolated by lectin affinity chromatography. Therefore, SACS using Lycopersicon esculentum lectin (LEL) can also be used to study disease interactomes.