Aberrant Fucosylation of Saliva Glycoprotein Defining Lung Adenocarcinomas Malignancy

Aberrant glycosylation is a hallmark of cancer found during tumorigenesis and tumor progression. Lung cancer induced by oncogene mutations has been detected in the patients saliva, and saliva glycosylation has been altered. Saliva contains highly glycosylated glycoproteins, the characteristics of which may be related to various diseases. Therefore, elucidating cancer-specific glycosylation in the saliva of healthy, non-cancer, and cancer patients can reveal whether tumor glycosylation has unique characteristics for early diagnosis. In this work, we used a solid-phase chemoenzymatic method to study the glycosylation of saliva glycoproteins in clinical specimens. The results showed that the 1,6-core fucosylation of glycoproteins in cancer patients was significant increased. The fucosylation of 1,2 or 1,3 is also increased in cancer patients. We further analyzed the expression of fucosyltransferases responsible for 1,2, 1,3, 1,6 fucosylation. The fucosylation of the saliva of cancer patients is drastically different from that of non-cancer or health controls. These results indicate that the glycoform of saliva fucosylation distinguishes lung cancer from other diseases, and this feature has the potential to diagnose lung adenocarcinoma. TOC O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=169 SRC="FIGDIR/small/472888v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (31K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@139bcc2org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@19777a5org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1302be6org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@19210d4_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG Fucosylation biosynthesis in lung cancer. Saliva fucosylation contains 1,2-linked, 1,3-linked, 1,6-linked fucosylation in lung cancer. C_FIG