RESUMEN
Objective To establish high resolution, reproducible 2-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE) profiles of invasive and non-invasive pituitary adenoma tissues and to identify differentially ex-pressed proteins between the invasive and non-invasive tissues. Methods The proteome from invasive and non-invasive pituitary adenomas tissues was dissected and analyzed by: (1) immobilized pH gradient two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, (2) silver staining, (3) imageMaster 2-D software analysis, (4) peptide mass fingerprint based (PMS) on matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF-MS), and (5) database comparison. Results High-resolution 2-D patterns of invasive and non-invasive pituitary adenoma tissues were successfully produced and re-peated 3 times for each sample. An average of 1080±24 and 1035±28 spots were detected for invasive and non-invasive pituitary adenoma tissues, respectively. Additionally, 975±45 and 918±56 spots were found to have an average matching rate of 90.3% and 88.7% for invasive and non-invasive tissues, re-spectively. The spot positional deviation was (1.563±0.259) mm for IEF and (1.088±0.206) mm for SDS-PAGE. A total of 99 spots of differential expression were matched between the invasive and non-in-vasive pituitary adenoma tissues. Thirty differential proteins, some of which were involved in the regula-tion of cells cycle and signal transduction, were initially characterized by PMS. Conclusion The acquisi-tion of well-resolved and reproducible 2-D patterns of invasive and non-invasive pituitary adenoma tissues and the identification of differentially expressed proteins provides a proteome database for invasive pituita-ry adenomas.