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영어

Fucosylation is one of the most common glycosylation and has been associated with the development of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) is clinically used as serological marker to diagnose HCC. Although the level of AFP increased in HCC patients, its sensitivity for diagnosis of HCC is poor because AFP levels are also increased in liver diseases, such as liver cirrhosis. Here, we introduced detection of AFP glycopeptides by parallel reaction monitoring (PRM) mass spectrometry (MS) combined with immunoprecipitation. Also, desialylation of AFP glycopeptides was used to improve MS detection limit (LOD < 2 ng/mL) and to obtain reliable signal (CV < 20%) from 0.1 μL serum. Finally, we compared serum samples from HCC with liver cirrhosis using relative percentage of fucosylated glycopeptide in AFP (AFP-fuc%). AFP-fuc% showed an area under the ROC curve (AUC = 0.949, p value < 0.0001) to discriminate between HCC and liver cirrhosis patients. These results suggest the potential of PRM-based AFP-fuc% in early diagnosis of HCC using serum samples.