Abstract
In acute leukemia (AL), several clinical symptoms may be caused by soluble factors secreted by AL cells into the bone marrow (BM) microenvironment. On the other hand, AL cells are often dependent on the microenvironment of the host, with most AL cells dying during first days after transferred to in vitro.
This support of leukemic cells may be mediated by soluble factors as well. Attention is logically focused on malignant cells and the composition of soluble factors may be unjustly omitted.
We aimed at identifying proteins in BM plasma of children with lymphoblastic AL (ALL), which may be responsible for ALL aggressiveness or for microenvironment-mediated survival of ALL cells. BM plasma and blood samples were analyzed by protein microarray and/or by two-dimensional electrophoresis (2D PAGE).
We detected 23 proteins with a significantly different concentration in patients by Protein microarray. Before 2D PAGE, BM plasma was immuno-depleted from 12 abundant proteins by affinity chromatography.
With this approach we succeeded to increase the number of spots that were analyzed by the PDQuest software.