Evaluation of the suitability of archival Bouin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissue specimens to proteomic investigation

Bouin's solution has been used for over a century as a common fixative in several pathology laboratories worldwide. Therefore, a considerable number of Bouin-fixed paraffin-embedded (BFPE) tumor samples of various origin are available in hospital repositories as a powerful information mine for clinical investigations. To date, however, such archived tissues have not been subjected to a systematic study aimed to evaluate their potential use in proteomics. In this report, we investigated whether archival BFPE tissue specimens could be exploited for proteomic studies, upon application of protein extraction and proteomic analysis methods previously optimized for formalin-fixed samples. As a result, gastric BFPE protein extracts exhibited poor suitability for 2D-PAGE analysis, whereas over 300 unique proteins could be successfully detected when extracts were subjected to SDS-PAGE followed by LC-MS/MS (GeLC-MS/MS). Among these, several known markers for gastric cancer and normal gastric functionality were identified, indicative of biological and clinical significance of proteomic data mined from BFPE tissues. A quantitative and qualitative comparison of FFPE and BFPE tissue proteomes was also performed, and results are reported. In conclusion, we demonstrated that BFPE specimens can be analyzed by means of a proteomic approach such as GeLC-MS/MS. Although considerable molecular biases and technical constraints exist, BFPE tissue archives can be fruitfully exploited for gathering proteomic data from particularly precious samples.     

Extraction of ground-state decay constant from dispersive sum rules: QCD vs potential models

We compare the extraction of the ground-state decay constant from the two-point correlator in QCD and in potential models and show that the results obtained at each step of the extraction procedure follow a very similar pattern. We prove that allowing for a Borel-parameter-dependent effective continuum threshold yields two essential improvements compared to employing a Borel-parameter-independent quantity: (i) It reduces considerably the (unphysical) dependence of the extracted bound-state mass and the decay constant on the Borel parameter. (ii) In a potential model, where the actual value of the decay constant is known from the Schrödinger equation, a Borel-parameter-dependent threshold leads to an improvement of the accuracy of the extraction procedure. Our findings suggest that in QCD a Borel-parameter-dependent threshold leads to a more reliable and accurate determination of bound-state characteristics by the method of sum rules.     

Heavy-to-light correlators beyond the light cone

We present the first systematic analysis of the off-light-cone effects in correlators relevant for the extraction of the heavy-to-light form factors within the method of light-cone sum rules. In a model with scalar constituents, the correlator is calculated in two different ways: (i) by performing the expansion of the Bethe-Salpeter amplitude of the light meson near the light cone x ² = 0 and (ii) by adopting the known solution for the Bethe-Salpeter amplitude which allows one to calculate the correlator without invoking any expansion. We demonstrate that the contributions to the correlator from the off-light-cone terms x ² ≠ 0 are not suppressed by any large parameter compared to the contribution of the light-cone term x ² = 0. For decays of heavy particles of mass in the range 1.5–5 GeV, the light-cone correlator is shown to systematically overestimate the full correlator, numerically the difference being 10–20%. The text was submitted by the authors in English.     

Study of systematic errors of bound-state parameters in SVZ sum rules

We study systematic errors of the ground-state parameters obtained from Shifman—Vainshtein—Zakharov sum rules, making use of the harmonic-oscillator potential model as an example. In this case, one knows the exact solution for the polarization operator, which allows one to obtain both the OPE to any order and the parameters (masses and decay constants) of the bound states. We determine the parameters of the ground state making use of the standard procedures of the method of sum rules and compare the obtained results with the known exact values. We show that, in the situation when the continuum contribution to the polarization operator is not known and is modeled by an effective continuum, the method of sum rules does not allow one to control the systematic uncertainties of the extracted ground-state parameters. The text was submitted by the authors in English.