Further information and requests for resources and reagents should be directed to and will be fulfilled by the Lead Contact, Hui Zhang (
[email protected] ).
This study did not generate new unique reagents.
The datasets generated during this study are available at CPTAC data portal and publicly available ( https://cptac-data-portal.georgetown.edu/study-summary/S038 ). The codes supporting the current study are publicly available and listed in the Key Resources Table .
The ovarian tumor and non-tumor tissue samples used in this study were acquired from the prospective project of Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC). Biospecimens were collected from 83 patients who were recently diagnosed with high-grade serous ovarian adenocarcinoma, underwent surgical resection and did not receive any prior treatment for their disease, including chemotherapy or radiotherapy. For each patient, up to 3 individual fimbria from each normal FT were collected as non-tumor tissue control. Twenty-three relevant non-tumor tissues from FTs included 13 paired non-tumor samples from the 83 patients. Ten patients provided FTs only as the matched tumor tissues from these 10 cases failed molecular qualification ( McDermott et al., 2020 ). There were 83 tumor and 23 non-tumor tissue samples were applied in this study. All cases were required to be of serous histology but were collected regardless of surgical stage or histologic grade. Cases were staged according to the 1988 International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) staging system.
Each specimen endured cold ischemia for ≤ 30 minutes prior to freezing in liquid nitrogen. The specimens were used for the global proteomics (Global) and glycoproteomics studies including solid phase extraction of N -linked glycosite-containing peptide (SPEG) and intact N -linked glycopeptide (IGP) analyses. Each specimen was embedded in optimal cutting temperature (OCT) medium, and histologic sections were obtained from the top and bottom portions for pathology review. Each case was reviewed by a board-certified pathologist to confirm the assigned pathology. For inclusion in this study, the top and bottom sections were required to contain 60% tumor cell nuclei with < 20% necrosis. The specimens were serially curled at the Biospecimen Core Resource, and the curled sections were then transferred into pre-cooled cryovials (Corning).
Specimens were shipped overnight from the Tissue Source Sites to the Proteome Characterization Center located at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore, MD using a cryoport that maintained an average temperature of < −150°C. All procedures were carried out on dry ice to maintain the tissue in a frozen state and processed for mass spectrometric (MS) analysis at JHU.
Clinical data were obtained from Tissue Source Sites and aggregated by the Biospecimen Core Resource. Data forms were stored as Microsoft Excel files (.xlsx). Clinical data can be accessed and downloaded from the CPTAC Data Portal ( https://cptac-data-portal.georgetown.edu/cptac/documents/CPTAC_S038_ovarian_cancer_clinical_data_r1.xlsx ). Demographics, histopathologic information, and treatment details were collected. Supplemental clinical data were collected directly from the original file, and the updated clinical data are provided in Table S1 . As shown in Table S1 , the characteristics of the CPTAC Prospective specimens reflect the general population of women with advanced ovarian cancer. The average age at diagnosis was 59.94 years, all cases were of serous histology. Most cases were at late stage, with 76% (63 of 83) of cases at FIGO stage III and 18% (15 of 83) at FIGO stage IV. The ‘SPL’ column was used to indicate the internal sample index for simplifying the sample name.
The experimental design is shown in Figure 1A . Approximately 30–200 mg of each of the sectioned ovarian tumor tissues or non-tumor tissues were homogenized separately in lysis buffer (8 M urea, 1.0 M NH 4 HCO 3 , pH 8.0) by sonication (Branson Sonifier 250, 15 s cycles with 1 min cool down, 4 times, 20% output). Lysates were precleared by centrifugation at 16,500 g for 15 min at 4°C and protein concentrations were determined by BCA assay (Pierce). Proteins (2mg/mL) were reduced with 10 mM tris (2-carboxyethyl) phosphine (TCEP) for 1 h at 37°C, and subsequently alkylated with 15mM iodoacetamide for 1 h at room temperature (RT) in the dark. Samples were diluted 1:5 with deionized water and digested with sequencing grade modified trypsin (Promega) at a 1:50 enzyme-to-substrate ratio. After overnight digestion at 37°C, another aliquot of the same amount of trypsin was added to the samples and further incubated at 37°C overnight. The digested samples were then acidified with 50% trifluoroacetic acid (TFA, Sigma) to ~pH 2. Tryptic peptides were desalted on reversed phase C18 SPE columns (Waters) and dried using a Speed-Vac (Thermo Scientific).
Desalted peptides from each sample were labeled with 10-plex TMT (Tandem Mass Tag) reagents (Thermo Fisher Scientific). Peptides (300 μg) from each of the prospective ovarian samples were dissolved in 55 μL of 0.5 M triethylammonium bicarbonate (TEAB), pH 8.5 solution, and mixed with 3 units of TMT reagent that was freshly dissolved in 130 μL of ethanol. After 1h incubation at RT, the reaction was quenched by acidification with 50% TFA to pH < 3. A reference sample was created by pooling an aliquot of peptides from each individual tumor and non-tumor sample, and TMT Channel 126 was used to label the pooled reference sample throughout the proteomic analysis. A single HGSOC tumor sample previously used as an internal quality control (QC) for the analysis of the prospectively-collected tumors ( Zhang et al., 2016 ) was prepared and repeatedly analyzed in the same manner in the current study. A total of 83 prospectively-collected tumors and 23 non-tumor samples together with 9 QC aliquots were co-randomized to 13 TMT sets. The sample-to-TMT channel mapping is shown in the “Experiment Design” sheet of Table S1 . After labeling, in each TMT set, peptides labeled by different TMT reagents were mixed and desalted on C18 SPE columns. After desalting, the peptides from each sample (3 mg) were divided to 4 groups: 200 μg for proteomic analysis, 400 μg for SPEG analysis, 1.1 mg for intact glycopeptide analysis, and 1.3 mg for additional analysis, if needed.
Extensive fractionation was performed by bRPLC to reduce sample complexity and thus reduce the likelihood of peptides being co-isolated and co-fragmented. This approach has been well-documented to reduce isobaric (i.e., iTRAQ, TMT) reporter ion ratio distortion effects ( Bantscheff et al., 2008 ) and it was applied in this study.
The samples were fractionated using bRPLC. Approximately 200 μg of 10-plex TMT labeled sample was first purified on strong cation exchange columns (Glygen), and then separated on a reversed phase Zorbax extend-C-18 column (4.6 × 100 mm column containing 1.8-um particles; Agilent) using an Agilent 1200 Infinity HPLC System. The solvent A consisted of 10 mM ammonium formate, pH 10.0. Solvent B consisted of 10 mM ammonium formate, pH 10, 90% acetonitrile as mobile phase. The separation gradient was set as follows: 2% B for 10 min, from 2 to 15% B for 5 min, from 15 to 45% B for 85 min, from 45 to 95% B for 5 min, and 95% B for 15 min. A total of 96 fractions were collected into a 96 well plate in a time-based mode. These fractions were then concatenated into 24 fractions by combining 4 fractions that are 24 fractions apart (i.e., combining fractions #1, #25, #49, and #73; #2, #26, #50, and #74; and so on). Each concatenated fraction was dried down in a Speed-Vac and re-suspended in 2% acetonitrile, 0.1% formic acid for LC-MS/MS analysis.
A total of 1.1 mg TMT labeled peptides from each set were adjusted to 95% ACN (v/v), 1% TFA (v/v) for intact glycopeptide enrichment using Retain AX Cartridges (RAX) (particle size 30–50 μm, 30 mg sorbent per cartridge, Thermo Fisher Scientific) ( Yang et al., 2017 ). The RAX columns were equilibrated three times with 1 mL of ACN, three times with 100 mM triethylammonium acetate, three times with water, and finally three times with 95% ACN (v/v), 1% TFA (v/v). The samples were loaded on to RAX columns and washed four times with 1 mL of 95% ACN, 1% TFA. Finally, bound intact glycopeptides were eluted in 400 μL of 50% ACN (v/v), 0.1% TFA (v/v). The intact glycopeptides were then dried in a Speed-Vac and stored in −80°C prior to LC–MS/MS analysis.
N -linked glycopeptides were captured by solid phase extraction of N-linked glycosite-containing peptides (SPEG) as described previously ( Zhang et al., 2003 ). Briefly, 400 μg TMT-labeled peptides (in C18 elution buffer: 60% ACN, 0.1%TFA) of each TMT set were oxidized by 10 mM of sodium periodate at room temperature for 1 h in the dark. After oxidation, samples were desalted on C18 SPE columns to remove sodium periodate. Then the sample was conjugated to 40μl hydrazide resin (Bio-Rad) in the presence of 1% Aniline at room temperature overnight by gentle shaking. Non-glycopeptides were removed by centrifugation at 6000 rpm for 1 min. Then the resin was intensively washed sequentially with 1) 50% ACN/50% deionized water (v/v), 2) 1.5M NaCl, 3) deionized water and 4) 25mM NH 4 HCO 3 , three times for each wash step, by vortexing and centrifugation. After the last wash, the hydrazide resin was reconstituted in 200μL 25mM NH 4 HCO 3 . The N -linked glycopeptides were released from the resin by incubation with 2μL PNGase F (New England Biolabs Inc) at 37°C overnight with gentle shaking. The released de-glycopeptides were dried and stored in −80°C prior to LC-MS/MS analysis.
The global proteome fractions were separated on a Dionex Ultimate 3000 RSLC nano system (Thermo Scientific) with a 75 μm × 50 cm PepMap RSLC C18 Easy-Spray column (Thermo Scientific) protected by a 100 μm × 2 cm Acclaim PepMap 100 guard column (Thermo Scientific). The mobile phase flow rate was 450 nL/min and consisted of 0.1% formic acid in water (A) and 0.1% formic acid/95% acetonitrile (B). The sample injected (6 μL) was trapped using 100% mobile phase A for 13 min at a flow rate of 5 μL/min before being placed in-line with the analytical column and subjected to a gradient profile which was set as follows: 2%–4% B for 10 min, 4%–24% B for 80 min, 24%–33% B for 22 min, 33%–95% B for 3 min, 95% B for 10 min at a flow rate of 320 nL/min. MS analysis was performed using a Q-Exactive mass spectrometer (Thermo Scientific). The Q-Exactive mass spectrometer parameters were as follows: electrospray voltage was 2.2 kV; following a 20 min delay from the end of sample trapping, Orbitrap precursor spectra (AGC 3×10 6 ) were collected from 400–1800 m/z for 110 minutes at a resolution of 70K along with the top 12 data dependent Orbitrap HCD MS/MS spectra at a resolution of 35K (AGC 2×10 5 ) and max ion time of 120 msec; ions selected for MS/MS were isolated at a width of 1.4 m/z and fragmented using a normalized collision energy of 31%; peptide match was set to ‘Preferred’; exclude isotopes was set to ‘on’; and charge state screening was enabled to reject unassigned 1+, and > 8+ ions with a dynamic exclusion time of 30 s to discriminate against previously analyzed ions.
The de-glycosylated glycosite-containing peptides isolated by SPEG were separated on a Dionex Ultimate 3000 RSLC nano system (Thermo Scientific) with a 75 um × 50 cm Acclaim PepMap RSLC C18 Easy-Spray column (Thermo Scientific) protected by a 100um × 2 cm Acclaim PepMap 100 guard column (Thermo Scientific). The mobile phase flow rate in the analytical column was 320 nL/min and consisted of 0.1% formic acid in water (A) and 0.1% formic acid/95% acetonitrile (B). The sample injected (6 μL) was trapped using 100% mobile phase A for 13 min at a flow rate of 5 μL/min before being placed in-line with the analytical column and subjected to the gradient profile which was set as follows: 2%–7% B for 10 min, 7%–27% B for 80 min, 27%–34% B for 22 min, 34%–95% B for 3 min, 95% B for 10 min. MS analysis was performed using a Q-Exactive mass spectrometer (Thermo Scientific). The Q-Exactive mass spectrometer parameters were as follows: electrospray voltage was 2.2 kV; following a 20 min delay from the end of sample trapping, Orbitrap precursor spectra (AGC 3×10 6 ) were collected from 400–1800 m/z for 110 minutes at a resolution of 70K along with the top 12 data dependent Orbitrap HCD MS/MS spectra at a resolution of 35K (AGC 2×10 5 ) and max ion time of 120 msec; ions selected for MS/MS were isolated at a width of 1.4 m/z and fragmented using a normalized collision energy of 31%; peptide match was set to ‘Preferred’; exclude isotopes was set to ‘on’; and charge state screening was enabled to reject unassigned 1+, and > 8+ ions with a dynamic exclusion time of 30 s to discriminate against previously analyzed ions. Each sample was analyzed by LC-MS/MS in triplicate.
The intact glycopeptides were analyzed on the Orbitrap Fusion Lumos system (Thermo Scientific). The intact glycopeptides were separated using an Easy nLC 1200 UPLC system (Thermo Scientific) on an in-house packed 20 cm × 75 mm diameter C18 column (1.9 mm Reprosil-Pur C18-AQ beads, Dr. Maisch GmbH); Picofrit 10 mm opening (New Objective). The column was heated to 50°C using a column heater (Phoenix-ST). The flow rate was 200 nL/min with 0.1% formic acid and 2% acetonitrile in water (A) and 0.1% formic acid/90% acetonitrile (B). Injected peptides were subjected to the following gradient: 2%–6% B for 1 min, 6%–30% B for 84 min, 30%–60% B for 9 min, 60%–90% B for 1 min, 90% B for 5 min and then back to 50% B for 10 min. The Fusion Lumos mass spectrometer parameters were as follows: electrospray voltage was 1.8 kV; the ion transfer tube temperature was at 250°C; Orbitrap precursor spectra (AGC 4×10 5 ) were collected from 350–1800 m/z for 110 min at a resolution of 60K along with data dependent Orbitrap HCD MS/MS spectra (centroided) at a resolution of 50K (AGC 2×10 5 ) and max ion time of 105 msec for a total duty cycle of 2 s; masses selected for MS/MS were isolated (quadrupole) at a width of 0.7 m/z and fragmented using a high energy collision dissociation of 38%; peptide charge state screening was enabled to reject unassigned 1+, 7+, 8+, and > 8+ ions with a dynamic exclusion time of 45 s to discriminate against previously analyzed ions between ± 10 ppm. Each sample was analyzed by LC-MS/MS in triplicate.
LC-MS/MS analysis of the TMT-labeled, bRPLC fractionated samples generated a total of 312 global proteomics data files. The Thermo RAW files were processed with ProteoWizard 3.0( Chambers et al., 2012 ) using ‘peak-picking’ for MS1 and MS2 spectra and converted to ‘.mzML’ format, and protein identification was conducted using MS-PyCloud ( Chen et al., 2018 ). MS-GF+v9881 ( Kim et al., 2008 ; Kim and Pevzner, 2014 ) was the default search engine in MS-PyCloud applied to match against the RefSeq human protein sequence database, released on May 02, 2016 (101,661 proteins). The partially tryptic search used a ± 10 ppm parent ion tolerance, 0.5 m/z fragment ion tolerance, allowed for isotopic error in precursor ion selection [−1,2], and searched a decoy database composed of the forward and reversed protein sequences. MS-GF+ settings included static carbamidomethylation (+57.0215 Da) on Cys residues, TMT modification (+229.1629 Da) on the peptide N terminus and Lys residues, and dynamic oxidation (+15.9949 Da) on Met residues for searching the global proteome data. Peptide identification stringency was tuned to not exceed a false discovery rate (FDR) of 1% at the peptide-spectrum match (PSM) level. In the protein inference conducted by MS-PyCloud, a minimum of 3 PSMs per peptide and 2 unique peptides per protein were required for achieving FDR < 1% at the protein level within the full dataset. Inference of parsimonious protein set resulted in a total of 8,144 common protein groups among all the tumor, non-tumor, pooled reference, and QC samples ( Table S2 ).
The intensities of all ten TMT reporter ions in each MS/MS spectrum were extracted using MS-PyCloud. Next, PSMs were linked to the extracted reporter ion intensities by scan number. The relative protein abundance was calculated using the ‘log2-median-median’ strategy. The pooled reference sample was labeled with TMT 126 reagent, allowing comparison of relative abundances across the normalized intensity values of the remaining 9 channels of the TMT 10-plexes on the PSM level. The median value of the log2-transformed relative abundances from different scans and different bRPLC fractions corresponding to the same peptide were used as the relative abundance of the peptide. The final relative protein abundance was calculated as the median value of the log2-transformed relative abundance from each protein’s constituent peptides. Small differences in sample handling can result in detectable systematic, sample-specific bias in the quantification of protein levels. In order to mitigate these effects, we computed the median, log2 relative protein abundance over all identified proteins for each sample followed by re-centering to achieve a common median of 0 (see Figure S1A ).
The glycosite-containing peptide identification for the 39 SPEG data files (each set has 3 replicated runs) were performed as described above (e.g., peptide level FDR < 1%), with an additional dynamic deamidation (+0.984016 Da) modification on Asn and Gln residues. For SPEG datasets, the TMT-10 quantitative data was summarized at the glycosite-containing peptide level ( Table S3 ). All the peptides (glycosite-containing peptides and global peptides) were labeled with TMT-10 reagent simultaneously. SPEG and intact glycopeptide analyses were performed after the TMT labeling. Thus, all the biases upstream of labeling are assumed to be identical between the global proteomics and glycoproteomics samples isolated by SPEG and intact glycopeptide enrichment. Therefore, to account for sample-specific biases in the glycosite-containing peptide analysis we normalized the relative abundance of the glycosite-containing peptides by subtracting the median values of log2-transformated relative abundance of glycoproteins in each sample (see Figure S1D ).
The intact N -linked glycopeptides were identified using GPQuest 2.1 software ( Hu et al., 2018 ; Mertins et al., 2018 ). Prior to database search, ProteoWizard 3.0 was used to convert the .RAW files to .mzML files with the “centroid all scans” option selected. GPQuest 2.1 was applied to identify intact glycopeptides to MS/MS spectra using two approaches: searching spectra containing oxonium ions (‘oxo-spectra’) and identifying intact N -linked glycopeptides. The oxonium ions were used as the signature features of the glycopeptides from the MS/MS spectra, which were caused by the fragmentation of glycans attached to intact glycopeptides in the mass spectrometer. In this study, the MS/MS spectra containing the oxonium ions (m/z 204.0966) in the top 10 abundant peaks after removing TMT reporter ions were considered as the potential glycopeptide candidates. The intact N -linked glycopeptides were identified by using GPQuest 2.1 to search against the database of unique deglycosylated peptide sequences identified from the SPEG method and a database containing 178 N -linked glycan compositions. The glycan database was collected from the public database of GlycomeDB ( Ranzinger et al., 2011 ) ( http://www.glycome-db.org ). Each tandem mass spectrum was first processed in a series of preprocessing procedures, including removing reporter ions, spectrum de-noising, intensity square root transformation ( Liu et al., 2007 ), oxonium ions evaluation and glycan type prediction ( Toghi Eshghi et al., 2016 ). The top 100 peaks in each preprocessed spectrum were matched to the fragment ion index generated from a peptide sequence database to identify all the candidate peptides. All the qualified (> 6 fragment ions matchings) candidate peptides were compared with the spectrum again to calculate the Morpheus scores ( Wenger and Coon, 2013 ) by considering all the peptide fragments, glycopeptide fragments, and their isotope peaks. The peptide having the highest Morpheus score was then assigned to the spectrum. The mass gap between the assigned peptide and the precursor mass was searched in the glycan database to find the associated glycan. The best hits of all ‘oxo-spectra’ were ranked by the Morpheus score in descending order, in which those with FDR 10% total intensity of each tandem spectrum were reserved as qualified identifications. The precursor mass tolerance was set as 10ppm, and the fragment mass tolerance was 20 ppm.
Similar to the process described for the analysis of glycosite-containing peptides in SPEG, the quantification of the intact glycopeptides was also conducted at the peptide level. The median log2 ratio value of all the PSMs of an identical intact glycopeptide was used as the relative abundance of the intact glycopeptide. The relative abundances of intact glycopeptides of samples were also normalized by subtracting the median value of glycoproteins in each corresponding sample expressed in the global datasets (See Figure S1G and Table S4 ).
The sample correlation was the indicator of the similarity of the expression values of the samples. To eliminate the influence of the pooled reference channel, the absolute intensity matrix was applied in the sample correlation procedure. Instead of using a ‘log2-median-median’ strategy, the ‘sum-of-intensity’ approach was used to generate the intensity matrix of protein expression. The median (MD) strategy is 1) calculate median log2 value of the i th sample ( mi = median ( y ij ; where j = 1… p ; i = 1... n ). Here, p is the total protein or peptide identification number, and n is the total sample number. 2) record m 0 = median ( m i ; where i = 1… n ). 3) center the data of each sample by subtracting median from each value ( y i j ′ = y i j − m i ) . The sum of intensity of all the reporter ions of the PSMs from all the fractions assigned to the same peptide was used as the absolute abundance of the peptide. The sum of peptide intensity values of the same protein was regarded as the absolute abundance of the protein. A Spearman’s rank correlation value was calculated between the two samples using their shared proteins (See Figure S1B ). As the correlation is a rank-based correlation, no normalization is required before the calculation. The sample correlation was also applied on the ‘sum-of-intensity’ peptide matrices of all the quality control samples of the SPEG dataset and the intact N -linked glycopeptide dataset (See Figures S1E and S1H ). The coefficient of variation (CV) values of the relative abundance (ratio values) of proteins or peptides of the QC samples were also calculated to evaluate the stability of the reproducibility of proteins or peptides expressed in the 9 QC samples (See Figures S1C , S1F , and S1I ).
The top 50% of most variable global proteins (2,958) without missing values were analyzed by CancerSubtypes ( Xu et al., 2017 ) for consensus clustering ( Monti et al., 2003 ) of tumor subtypes. For the glycosite-containing peptide and IGP data, an identical approach was applied on the 50% most variable glycosite-containing peptides and IGPs. Specifically, 80% of the original sample pool was randomly subsampled without replacement and partitioned into three major clusters using hierarchical clustering, which was repeated 500 times ( Wilkerson and Hayes, 2010 ). The expression values were transformed into Z scores using the built-in standardization function of R. The sample clustering result was reported in Table S5 . For the IGP clustering, the corresponding glycan types were also listed on the left side of the heatmap of the clustered expression matrix to illustrate the possible relationship between tumor clusters and the associated glycan types ( Figure 2A ). The preferential glycan types and enriched pathways of different intact glycopeptides were grouped and shown in the left side columns of Figure 2A . The Z-score transformed the abundance of intact glycopeptides were grouped by the IG types in each IGP cluster to show the preferential glycosylation in each tumor cluster ( Figure 2E ).
The abundance levels of GLOBAL, SPEG, and IGP were transformed to binary vectors. The spearman’s rank correlation coefficient values of each pair of binary vectors were calculated by using Python SciPy package. The results were visualized in the Figures 2B and 2C for GLOBAL and SPEG comparing to IGP respectively. The categorical clinical phenotypes, such as tumor grade, tumor stage, participant race, anatomic site, origin site were also transformed to binary vectors for each class of the corresponding clinical phenotype and then correlated with the tumor clusters of IGP datasets. The numeric clinical phenotypes, such as tumor cellularity and participant age were directly correlated with the tumor clusters using spearman’s rank correlation method. The result was shown in Figure 2D .
The principal component analysis (PCA) function under OmicsOne ( Hu et al., 2019 ) using scikit-learn package ( Pedregosa et al., 2011 ) was implemented to conduct the unsupervised clustering analysis with the parameter ‘n_components = 2′ on the expression matrix of global proteomic data, in which there are 106 samples (observations) and 365 intact glycopeptides (features). The 95% confidence coverage was represented by an ellipse for each group, which was calculated based on the mean and covariance of points in that group (see Figure 3A ). A similar approach was also applied on the GLOBAL proteomic and SPEG glycoproteomic datasets (see Figures S3A and S3B ).
To uncover discriminating features between tumors and non-tumors, we performed the t test analysis on the global proteomic dataset of 5916 global proteins expressed on tumor and non-tumor samples. The permutation corrected p values were calculated using Perseus with setting the FDR = 0.01 to identify the significant alternations. A total of 645 significantly upregulated and 587 significantly downregulated proteins were observed in the filtered results (see Figure S3C ). A similar approach was also applied to the SPEG and IGP glycoproteomic data (See Figures S3D and 3B and Table S6 ).
CombiROC is an interactive web tool for selecting accurate marker combinations of omics data ( Mazzara et al., 2017 ). It was applied to plot the Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for the differential intact glycopeptides in tumor and non-tumor samples, in which both signal cutoff and minimum features were set to 1 to plot the results. The result was shown in Figure 3C .
DAVID 6.8 was applied on the 48 significantly upregulated and 94 significantly downregulated intact glycopeptides to perform gene-annotation enrichment analysis and shown in Figure 3D . The 365 identified glycopeptides were classified to HM, Fuc, and Sia types based on their glycan compositions, and separately plotted according to their median log2 ratio values in tumor and non-tumor sample groups as shown in Figure 3E . DAVID 6.8 was also applied on the gene name list of intact glycopeptides associated with HM, Fuc, and Sia glycan types for enriched pathways ( Figure 3F ).
The t tests were applied to the common global proteins, glycosite-containing peptides, and intact glycopeptides respectively to determine their differential expression in the tumor and non-tumor tissues ( Figures 4A and 4B ). The glycosylation sites of CA125 (MUC16) and its identified glycosite-containing peptides (SPEG) were highlighted in Figures 4C – 4E to indicate the differential expression of global protein and the three glycosite-containing peptides. For further comparison, their corresponding expression values across all samples are shown as four boxplots representing expression in tumors and non-tumors ( Figures 4D and 4E ). The heterogenous glycosylation events on the identical glycosite of SSR2 were plotted in Figures 4F – 4H .
The intact glycopeptide expression was hypothesized to be influenced at least by the expression of substrate glycoproteins and glycosylation enzymes. The log2 ratio values of intact glycopeptides were correlated with the 22 glycosylation enzymes identified from the global proteomic data in this study. The correlation matrix was further arranged by hierarchical clustering on glycopeptides (columns) and glycosylation enzymes (rows) and visualized in Figure 5A . The glycan compositions were linked to the intact glycopeptides. The intact glycopeptides were classified as different groups for two comparisons based on the glycan structure they carry: one comparison is whether glycopeptides contained HM glycans ( Figures 5D and 5E ); the other is whether glycopeptides contained Fuc glycans ( Figure 5C ). For each comparison, the correlations between the IPGs and specific glycosylation enzyme (FUT11, PRKCSH, or MAN1A1) that correlated with the IGPs across all samples were calculated and shown in a boxplot. The hypothesis of tumor-specific glycosylation mechanism was shown in Figure 6A .
The gene names of significantly elevated intact glycopeptides modified by HM glycans in tumors were submitted in STRING 10.5 ( Szklarczyk et al., 2017 ). The minimum required interaction score was set to 0.7. The protein-protein interaction network was shown in Figure 6B by disabling structure previews inside network bubbles, hiding disconnected nodes and small groups in the network.