Moving translational mass spectrometry imaging towards transparent and reproducible data analyses: A case study of an urothelial cancer cohort analyzed in the Galaxy framework

BackgroundMass spectrometry imaging (MSI) derives spatial molecular distribution maps directly from clinical tissue specimens. This allows for spatial characterization of molecular compositions of different tissue types and tumor subtypes, which bears great potential for assisting pathologists with diagnostic decisions or personalized treatments. Unfortunately, progress in translational MSI is often hindered by insufficient quality control and lack of reproducible data analysis. Raw data and analysis scripts are rarely publicly shared. Here, we demonstrate the application of the Galaxy MSI tool set for the reproducible analysis of an urothelial carcinoma dataset. MethodsTryptic peptides were imaged in a cohort of 39 formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded human urothelial cancer tissue cores with a MALDI-TOF/TOF device. The complete data analysis was performed in a fully transparent and reproducible manner on the European Galaxy Server. Annotations of tumor and stroma were performed by a pathologist and transferred to the MSI data to allow for supervised classifications of tumor vs. stroma tissue areas as well as for muscle-infiltrating and non-muscle invasive urothelial carcinomas. For putative peptide identifications, m/z features were matched to the MSiMass list. ResultsRigorous quality control in combination with careful pre-processing enabled reduction of m/z shifts and intensity batch effects. High classification accuracy was found for both, tumor vs. stroma and muscle-infiltrating vs. non-muscle invasive tumors. Some of the most discriminative m/z features for each condition could be assigned a putative identity: Stromal tissue was characterized by collagen type I peptides and tumor tissue by histone and heat shock protein beta-1 peptides. Intermediate filaments such as cytokeratins and vimentin were discriminative between the tumors with different muscle-infiltration status. To make the study fully reproducible and to advocate the criteria of FAIR (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability) research data, we share the raw data, spectra annotations as well as all Galaxy histories and workflows. Data are available via ProteomeXchange with identifier PXD026459 and Galaxy results via https://github.com/foellmelanie/Bladder_MSI_Manuscript_Galaxy_links. ConclusionHere, we show that translational MSI data analysis in a fully transparent and reproducible manner is possible and we would like to encourage the community to join our efforts.