Proteomic analysis of foam cells.

Foam cells are characteristic pathological cells in the lesions of atherosclerosis. Previous works have established macrophage-derived foam cell model to study the central role of the foam cells, and analyzed the protein expression profiles in foam cells. The reported in vitro foam cell model was established by incubating the human U937 cells with oxidized low-density lipoprotein. The global changes in protein expressions between U937 foam cell and normal U937 cells were measured with two-dimensional gel electrophoresis, and some interested proteins were tryptic-digested and then identified via mass spectrometry after capillary liquid chromatography separation. Some of the identified proteins were validated via the Internet links to the U937 proteomic map provided from the Expasy Proteomics server (http://us.expasy.org). The experimental data can provide potential markers during the inflammatory reactions for atherosclerotic studies.