Towards a proteomic analysis of atopic dermatitis: A two-dimensional- polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis/mass spectrometric analysis of cultured patient-derived fibroblasts

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic relapsing inflammatory skin disease typically characterized by a distribution of eczematous skin lesions with lichenification, pruritic excoriations, and dry skin with wide varieties of pathophysiologic aspects. Recently, AD was divided into extrinsic and intrinsic forms according to the presence or absence of an allergy. We investigated alterations in protein expression in primary cultured AD cells from the patient biopsy samples by two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DE) and matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization-time of flight. In the primary cultured fibroblasts, we obtained 31 candidate proteins from the two-dimensional gel image analysis in which 18 proteins were up-regulated, eight proteins were down-regulated and five proteins were post-translationally modified. From these 2-DE results, we found several candidate genes matched proteomic expression patterns by semi-quantitative reverse transcription PCR. Since the exact mechanism of atopic alterations in fibroblasts remains unknown, our results may provide new clues to aid in understanding AD.