Proteomic analysis of the inflammatory response of endothelial cells

In collaboration with the team of J-P Girard at IPBS, we use large-scale proteomic analysis associated with label-free quantification to study the pathways and processes activated in endothelial cells (ECs) under inflammatory conditions. 
More than 10 years ago, we developed original bioinformatics tools to extract peptide signals from raw MS files, measure their intensity, and perform quantitative analysis of protein expression in large-scale studies. Using such methods, we could extensively map the ECs proteome, and provided the most complete proteomic characterization to date of the human EC response to several inflammatory cytokines, such as TNFα, IFNgamma and IL1β (1,2).
We keep on applying such a global proteomic approaches, for example to analyze IL-33 function in endothelial cells. IL-33 is a nuclear cytokine from the IL-1 family that plays important roles in health and disease. We compared the extracellular and intracellular roles of IL-33 inprimary human endothelial cells, and found that exogenous extracellular IL-33 acts as a cytokine inducing expression of a distinct set of proteins associated with inflammatory responses in endothelial cells, but not as a nuclear factor (3) .