Figure 1.

Schematic diagram of the experimental workflow. Serum samples were collected from 17 BBTD patients and 19 CCA patients, which were then subjected to routine ELISA for CEA and CA19-9. Purified proteins from these samples were then separated by SDS-PAGE. After migration, entire lanes were divided into 5 sections, which were excised into slices and treated with in-gel digestion. The resulting tryptic peptides were subjected to reverse-phase LC-MS/MS, from which the mass spectrometric results were then analyzed for protein identification and quantification. The relative quantitation ratios were subjected to statistical analyses and 6-fold cross-validation to retrieve the DE proteins between BBTDs and CCA.