JTM

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Open Access Methodology

High correlation of the proteome patterns in bone marrow and peripheral blood blast cells in patients with acute myeloid leukemia

Gero Hütter1*, Anne Letsch1, Daniel Nowak1, Julia Poland2, Pranav Sinha2, Eckhard Thiel1 and Wolf-K Hofmann1

Author Affiliations

1 Department of Internal Medicine III (Hematology, Onkology), Charité Berlin Campus Benjamin Franklin, Berlin, Germany

2 Institute of Laboratory Medicine and Clinical Chemistry, LKH Klagenfurt, Austria

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Journal of Translational Medicine 2009, 7:7 doi:10.1186/1479-5876-7-7

Published: 15 January 2009

Abstract

Background

When comparing myelogenous blasts from bone marrow and peripheral blood, immunophenotyping usually show a strong correlation of expression of surface antigens. However, it remains to be determined, whether this correlation also exists on the level of protein expression.

Method

Therefore, we investigated both bone marrow and peripheral blood blast cells from six patients with newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukemia (AML) using conventional two-dimensional electrophoresis in the first dimension and linear polyacrylamide gels (12%) in the second dimension. Proteins were visualized using the silver staining method and image analysis was performed using the PDQuest system.

Results

For each patient over 80 proteins were evaluated in the sample from peripheral blood and bone marrow. We could demonstrate that the protein expression profile of bone marrow did not significantly differ from the expression patterns of peripheral blast cells.

Conclusion

The proteome-set of leukemic blast cells from marrow and blood, does not differ substantially when drawn from AML patients with over 80 percent blast cells in both compartments. This indicates that in AML, blasts from peripheral blood samples can be considered suitable for investigations of the proteome using 2D-electrophoresis.