Protein expression profiling of brain tumor tissue using SELDI-MS.

Surface-enhanced laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (SELDI-MS) is an established, chip-based method for protein profiling, typically used for biomarker discovery. By combining retention chromatography and mass spectrometry on the same analytical platform, it allows for reliable analyses of small sample quantities in a high-throughput fashion. As such, it is a highly useful tool for a wide range of research fields. We have successfully applied it on brain tumor tissue samples to screen for differences in protein expression between invasive and noninvasive benign meningioma. This chapter lays out the details of the protocols we used, and can serve as a guide for protein expression profiling experiments on brain tumor tissue using SELDI-MS.