Preparation of Mitochondria from Ovarian Cancer Tissues and Control Ovarian Tissues for Quantitative Proteomics Analysis.

Ovarian cancer is a common gynecologic cancer with high mortality but unclear molecular mechanism. Most ovarian cancers are diagnosed in the advanced stage, which seriously hampers therapy. Mitochondrial changes are a hallmark of human ovarian cancers, and mitochondria are the centers of energy metabolism, cell signaling, and oxidative stress. In-depth insights into the changes of the mitochondrial proteome in ovarian cancers compared to control ovarian tissue will benefit in-depth understanding of the molecular mechanisms of ovarian cancer, and the discovery of effective and reliable biomarkers and therapeutic targets. An effective mitochondrial preparation method coupled with an isobaric tag for relative and absolute quantification (iTRAQ) quantitative proteomics are presented here to analyze human ovarian cancer and control mitochondrial proteomes, including differential-speed centrifugation, density gradient centrifugation, quality assessment of mitochondrial samples, protein digestion with trypsin, iTRAQ labeling, strong cation exchange fractionation (SCX), liquid chromatography (LC), tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS), database analysis, and quantitative analysis of mitochondrial proteins. Many proteins have been successfully identified to maximize the coverage of the human ovarian cancer mitochondrial proteome and to achieve the differentially expressed mitochondrial protein profile in human ovarian cancers.