Biricioiu, M.R.; Sarbu, M.; Ica, R.; Vukelić, Ž.; Kalanj-Bognar, S.; Zamfir, A.D. Advances in Mass Spectrometry of Gangliosides Expressed in Brain Cancers. Int. J. Mol. Sci.2024, 25, 1335.
Biricioiu, M.R.; Sarbu, M.; Ica, R.; Vukelić, Ž.; Kalanj-Bognar, S.; Zamfir, A.D. Advances in Mass Spectrometry of Gangliosides Expressed in Brain Cancers. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2024, 25, 1335.
Biricioiu, M.R.; Sarbu, M.; Ica, R.; Vukelić, Ž.; Kalanj-Bognar, S.; Zamfir, A.D. Advances in Mass Spectrometry of Gangliosides Expressed in Brain Cancers. Int. J. Mol. Sci.2024, 25, 1335.
Biricioiu, M.R.; Sarbu, M.; Ica, R.; Vukelić, Ž.; Kalanj-Bognar, S.; Zamfir, A.D. Advances in Mass Spectrometry of Gangliosides Expressed in Brain Cancers. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2024, 25, 1335.
Abstract
Gangliosides are highly abundant in the human brain where they are involved in major biological events. In brain cancers, alterations of ganglioside pattern occur, some of which being correlated with the neoplastic transformation, while others with the tumor proliferation. Of all the techniques, mass spectrometry (MS) has proven to be one of the most effective in gangliosidomics, due to its ability to characterize heterogeneous mixtures and discover species with biomarker value. This review highlights the most significant achievements of MS in the analysis of gangliosides in human brain cancers. The first part presents the state-of-the-art in the MS development for discovery of ganglioside markers in primary brain tumors, with a particular emphasis on the ion mobility separation (IMS) MS and its contribution to the elucidation of the gangliosidome associated with aggressive tumors. The second part is focused on the MS of gangliosides in brain metastases, highlighting the ability of matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI)-MS, microfluidics-MS and tandem MS to decipher and structurally characterize species involved in the metastatic process. In the end, several conclusions and perspectives are presented, among which the need for development of a reliable software and a user-friendly structural database as a search platform in brain tumor diagnostics.
Keywords
brain cancers; gangliosides; mass spectrometry; biomarker discovery; screening; structural analysis
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
