ABSTRACT
Chemotherapeutic drug resistance is a frequent cause of treatment failure in colon cancer patients. Several mechanisms have been implicated in drug resistance. However, they are not suffi cient to exhaustively account for this resistance emergence. In this study, two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DE) and the PDQuest software analysis were applied to compare the differential expression of irinotecan-resistance-associated protein in human colon adenocarcinoma LoVo cells and irinotecan-resistant LoVo cells (LoVo/irinotecan). The differential protein dots were excised and analysed by ESI-Q-TOF mass spectrometry (MS). Fifteen proteins were identifi ed, including eight proteins with decreased expression and seven proteins with increased expression. The identifi ed known proteins included those that function in diverse biological processes such as cellular transcription, cell apoptosis, electron transport/redox regulation, cell proliferation/differentiation and retinol metabolism pathways. Identifi cation of such proteins could allow improved understanding of the mechanisms leading to the acquisition of chemoresistance.