Identificação de proteínas diferencialmente expressas em modelos animais de epilepsia

Abstract

Studies about human diseases using animal models are really important to our understanding about the physiopathology mechanisms from those diseases.Particularly, the models that reproduce the Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) in rodents, presents epileptogenicity similar to that found in ex vivo human tissues.The TLE affects around 40% of the adult patients and it is clinic characterized by a progressive development of seizures with temporal lobe focus, caused by an unbalance between the excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmission. Patients who present that type of epilepsy normally don't respond well to the treatments. Of this type of epilepsy, the Mesial Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (MTLE) is the most common one and it is characterized by the commitment of the mesial temporal lobe structures, such as in the Hipocampal Sclerosis. To realize these studies the proteomics has many powerful tools that allow us to elucidate complex biological mechanisms, to find altered proteins in the whole organism and describe protein expression patterns in different physiological and pathological conditions. Therefore, it's relevant to study this protein expression pattern in the hippocampus of animal models of MTLE using proteomics techniques, searching for informative data that lead us to the understanding of the involved mechanisms in the epileptogenicity. In this study we identified proteins that can indicate new pathways involved in the epileptogenesis processes. Furthermore, our data demonstrate that additional molecular complexity could be observed as hippocampal subfields were analyzed separately. We believe that the further integration of the proteomic data with other "omics" approaches could generate even more informative data about those neuronal processes.