Biomarkers Flashcards
What is a biomarker?
Biomarkers are a measurable indicator of a biological state. They can be molecular, physical, genetic, or observational.
What do the biomarkers that this lecture focus on characterise?
- Normal biological processes.
- Pathological processes.
- Pharmacologic responses to therapeutic intervention.
Give examples of compounds that can be used as biomarkers?
Metabolites, lipids, protein abundance, protein modification, protein fragments, mRNA levels, miRNA levels, SNPs, genetic profile.
Put plasma, tissue, and urine in order of information content (most to least) when used as biomarkers.
Tissue, plasma, urine.
What is capillary electrophoresis mass spectrometry?
In this process, the capillary electrophoresis is used to separate different molecules based upon their molecular weight and the mass spectrometry is used to measure/identify the different molecules.
The separation method is based on the idea that, when acted upon by an electrical current, smaller molecules will travel further and larger molecules will move less.
What is laser capture microdissection?
Laser capture microdissection is a method for isolating specific cells of interest from microscopic regions of tissue/cells/organisms (dissection on a microscopic scale with the help of a laser).
How can laser capture microdissection be used?
LCM technology can harvest the cells of interest directly or can isolate specific cells by cutting away unwanted cells to give histologically pure enriched cell populations.
What are some downstream applications of laser capture microdissection?
- DNA genotyping and loss-of-heterozygosity (LOH) analysis.
- RNA transcript profiling.
- cDNA library generation.
- proteomics discovery.
- signal-pathway profiling.
What is the future of biomarkers?
Multimarker scores are generally associated with only a moderate increase in the area under the receiver-operating-characteristic curve (AUC) compared with a risk score based on conventional risk factors alone.
Integrated ‘omic’ biomarkers represent the next generation of diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers.
