An integrated landscape of protein expression in human cancer

Using public proteomics datasets, mostly available through the PRIDE database, we assembled a proteomics resource for 191 cancer cell lines and 246 clinical tumour samples, across 13 cancer lineages. We found that baseline protein abundance in cell lines was generally representative of tumours. However, when considering differences in protein expression between tumour subtypes, as exemplified in the breast lineage, many of these changes were no longer recapitulated in the cell line models. Integration of proteomics and transcriptomics data suggested that the level of transcriptional control in cell lines changed significantly depending on their lineage. Additionally, in agreement with previous studies, variation in mRNA levels was often a poor predictor of changes in protein abundance. To our knowledge, this work constitutes the first meta-analysis study including cancer-related proteomics datasets. We anticipate this aggregated dataset will be of significant aid to future studies requiring a reference to baseline protein expression in cancer.