Studies Of The Cerebrospinal Fluid Of Patients With Multiple Sclerosis By An Integrated Proteomics Approach

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic inflammatory demyelinating disease of unknown cause. Epidemi ological and genetic studies suggest that an exogenous agent, perhaps viral, produces the disease. A clue to the nature of the disease may be found in the presence of elevated levels of Intrathecally synthesized IgG and oligoclonal bands(OGBs) present in the CSF and brain of more than 90%of MS patients and seen almost exclusively in infectious and inflammatory diseases of the CNS. In every instance where the specificity of the OGBs has been identified, these bands have been shown to represent antibodies directed against the causative agent . To date, no antigen in an MS brain has been identified as the major target of the immune response.Objective: To find the proteins that present only in MS CSF which helped revealing the pathogenesis of MS through displaying some special proteins, and helped offering some drug targets for the therapy of diseases.Methods: Two-dimensional gel electrophoresis and peptide mass fingerprinting were used to identify proteins in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) pooled from patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and patients with non-MS inflammatory central nervous system(CNS) disorders.