Natural protein variants in the saliva of patients with Warthins tumor

Natural protein variants in the saliva of patients with Warthin's tumor

Warthin's tumor, also known as papillary cystadenoma lymphomatosum, is one of the most common types of salivary gland (SG) tumors. Although it is generally accepted that the most common type of SG tumor is a mixed tumor (pleomorphic adenoma), research indicates that Warthin's tumors are increasingly becoming the predominant type. Therefore, a better understanding of these tumors seems to be a promising and important research topic.

The classical approach to the diagnosis of SG cancers is based on imaging techniques and fine needle biopsy, followed by histopathological analysis of the removed tumors. The use of saliva as a diagnostic material remains unexplored, although it allows non-invasive testing for the patient.

In the present study, we performed proteomic analysis of saliva samples collected from patients with Warthin's tumor and control samples from healthy subjects .

The results of our previous research on the proteome composition of saliva from patients with salivary gland tumors suggest the presence of certain sequence variants that may be potential markers of diagnostic significance. Previous studies were conducted on samples from different types of salivary gland tumors, while the current study focuses specifically on one type of tumor. To identify potential protein variants, we used the AliceDB database (www.alicedb.ug.edu.pl) developed in our laboratory, which allows for identification based on data from mass spectrometry measurements of canonical protein sequences (UniProt database) as well as isoforms and variants described in the literature.

In the present study, we performed a proteomic analysis of saliva samples collected from patients with Warthin tumors (12 samples), patients with Mixed tumors (12 samples) and control samples from healthy individuals (12 samples). An additional aspect of the research that we decided to focus on was the analysis of naturally occurring protein variants in patient samples, as opposed to only canonical protein sequences identified in classical proteomic approaches using databases such as UniProt. For this purpose, we used AliceDB, a bioinformatics tool developed in our research group, enabling the analysis of both canonical protein sequences as well as isoforms, naturally occurring variants and mutations.