Proteomic Investigation of Human Burn Wounds by 2D-Difference Gel Electrophoresis and Mass Spectrometry

Abstract

Background-In humans, thermal cutaneous injury represents a serious traumatic event that induces a host of dynamic alterations. Unfortunately the molecular mechanisms that underlie these serious perturbations remain poorly understood. We applied a global analysis method to identify dynamically changing proteins within the burn environment, which could eventually become biomarkers or targets for treatment.

The blister fluid proteome of paediatric burns

“…Some previously reported candidate biomarkers of burn injury such as C-reactive protein [17], SCCA1/SCCA2 [16], gelsolin [16], IQGAP1 [16], Lactate dehydrogenase B [16], leukocyte elastase inhibitor [16], haptoglobin [16], HSP 90 [16], haemoglobin [37], β2-Microglobulin [18], apolipoprotein A [18], Coagulation factor X [18], prothrombin [18], complement C8 and C9 [18], antithrombin 3 [18], and plasminogen [18] were also identified in this study (Table 4). More interestingly, some of these proteins were only detected in one or two of the burn depth categories examined.…”

“…A considerable number of burn injury studies have focused on the examination of biopsy and debrided hyperplastic tissue [15,16] or blood samples [17][18][19] from patients to evaluate underlying biology. However, tissue and blood collection are both highly invasive approaches and distressful for children.…”

“…injury have discovered significant abundance changes in proteins associated with: cellular signalling; inflammatory mediation; response to acute stress and injury; inflammatory and immune response; cellular integrity maintenance; and cytoskeletal formation [16][17][18][19][23][24][25].…”

Cooling of burns: Mechanisms and models

“…The small-animal models suffer from contamination of the control areas by the systemic effects of the burns that represent a significant %TBSA [22,30,35]. Human models have all used deep burns, either through the methodology of the experiment [7,29], or the fact that the patients were undergoing debridement of deep burns prior to skin grafting [48,50]. This limits what can be learned from the results in terms of how CWT improves outcomes for partial-thickness burns.…”

“…Again, these data show that there is a definable change in protein expression in burns, with a temporal pattern fitting to the known pathophysiology of burns wounds. HSPs, those genes associated with anaerobic metabolism (LDH), and protease inhibitors -known to be essential in wound healing -are all altered in burns [49], yet novel pathways of potential biologic interest have also been discovered [50]. None of these studies investigated the effects of cooling.…”