 |
     |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
VISUALIZATION |
|
A protein's presence on the surface of a cancerous cell can provide insight into the mechanisms of the cancer that could be disrupted by drugs, or could be used as a bulls-eye for identifying and attacking the cancer cell directly. Protein fragments (peptides) can be identified and quantified for a single sample by the mass spectrometry platform. Once these identifications and quantities are scaled and aligned across samples, peptide differentials between sets of samples can be identified. This heat map shows the prevalence of a series of peptide protein indicators (along the Y axis) in a series of samples (along the X axis) using color (where green represents rarity, black represents average, and red represents abundance). Samples were derived from normal colorectal tissue, from colorectal tissue with specific stages of cancer, or from commercial cell lines that have been associated with colorectal cancer.
A closer look at a subset of this data for peptides all associated with a specific protein suggests that this protein might be associated with the onset of colorectal cancer, and with later stages of the disease:
|
