Phosphatase and
tensin homolog (PTEN)-induced
kinase 1 (Pink1) is regarded as a
tumor suppressor and plays an important role in
cancer cell biology, while relatively few studies have examined Pink1 in
breast cancer, especially in vivo. The aims of this study were to investigate Pink1 expression in different subtypes of
breast cancer tissues and cell lines and explore the effect of Pink1
protein on
breast cancer. In these experiments, Pink1 expression was investigated using the tissue microarray immunohistochemistry (TMA-IHC) method in 150 samples of
breast cancer tissues with different subtypes, and strong staining of Pink1 was significantly correlated with the histological grade of
breast cancer (p = 0.015). In addition, Pink1
messenger RNA (
mRNA) displayed much higher expression levels in
breast cancer cell lines than in MCF-10A breast epithelial cells. Moreover, proteomic data obtained by isobaric tags for relative and absolute quantification (iTRAQ) showed that Pink1 deletion induced a distinct proteomic profile in MDA-MB-231 cells, and enrichment analysis showed that the differential
proteins were concentrated mainly in energy metabolism-related pathways. Moreover, Seahorse XF analysis showed that Pink1 knockout reduced the glycolytic ability of MDA-MB-231 cells. Our findings indicated that Pink1 may be an
indicator of
malignancy in
breast cancer and that it presents oncogenic properties in
breast cancer, which raises another perspective for understanding the regulatory role of Pink1 in
breast cancer.