Browsing through the most recent proteomics dataset on the public PRIDE database, I came across this study (PXD033148) from Wang and colleagues at Xiangya Hospital of Central South University in China. In this study, they overexpressed Profilin 1 (PFN1), a protein that has been implicated in metastasis and drug resistance in cancer, in H1299 cells.
I decided to upload the dataset on the Omics Playground platform and look at the differences between cells overexpressing PFN1 and empty vector controls. The GSE analysis module revealed a striking negative correlation between PFN1 overexpression and gene sets associated with the proteasome (Fig.1, highlighted in blue).
As it happens, the same group recently published an article implicating PFN1 over-expression at the transcriptome level with bortezomib resistance in multiple myeloma. It is thus interesting to observe that the overexpression of PFN1 induces a protein expression pattern that is strongly opposed not only to the profile generated by bortezomib, but also that of a different proteasome inhibitor, carfilzomib (Fig.1, highlighted in red).
In particular, PFN1 overexpression appears to inhibit the expression of most of the subunits of the proteasome S20 particle (Fig. 2), which also happens to be the binding target of carfilzomib.
The data was produced as part of the following published study: https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2022.890891.