A new bioinformatics insight into human cancer-associated proteins

Abstract

Cancer is a complex disease caused by multiple factors including genetic mutations, and environmental factors. Cancer-associated proteins are potential biomarkers or targets for diagnostic and therapeutic interventions in cancer. The Universal Protein Resourse (UniPort) is a well-annotated comprehensive resourse for protein sequence records. In the present study, we performed data mining of UniProt proteins as a proteomic resource. We generated a catalog of 1653 cancer-associated proteins including 344 secretory proteins and 300 cell surface proteins. Integrated bioinformatic analysis including ontological classification, functional enrichment and pathway construction were performed. These proteins could serve as a reference for further studies to discover cancer targets, and the enriched bioinformatic analysis provides new insights into cancer proteomics research.