Proteome alterations during clonal isolation of established human pancreatic cancer cell lines

Clonal isolation is an integral step of numerous workflows in genome editing and cell engineering. It comprises the isolation of a single progenitor cell from a defined cell line population with subsequent expansion to obtain a monoclonal cell population. This process is associated with transient loss of cell–cell contacts and absence of a multicellular microenvironment. Previous studies have revealed transcriptomic changes upon clonal isolation with cell line specific extent. Since transcriptome alterations are only partially reflected on the proteome level, we sought to investigate the impact of clonal isolation on the cellular proteome to a depth of > 6000 proteins in three established pancreatic cancer cell lines. We show that clonal isolation does have an impact on the cellular proteome, however, with cell line specific extent, affecting different biological processes, and also depending on the isolation method. We demonstrate a different impact of clonal isolation on mesenchymal- and epithelial-derived cell lines mainly affecting cell proliferation, metabolism, cell adhesion and cellular stress. The results bear relevance to the field of genomic editing and cell engineering and highlight the need to consider the impact of clonal isolation when interpreting data stemming from experiments that include this step. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00018-022-04584-9.