ABSTRACT: With the use of iTRAQ technique, a multifactorial comparative proteomic study can be performed. In this study, to obtain an overview of ethanol, CYP2E1 and gender effects on liver injury and gain more insight into the underlying molecular mechanism, mouse liver proteomes were quantitatively analyzed using iTRAQ under eight conditions including mice of different genders, wild type versus CYP2E1 knockout, and normal versus alcohol diet. A series of statistical and bioinformatic analyses were explored to simplify and clarify multifactorial comparative proteomic data. First, with the Principle Component analysis, six proteins, CYP2E1, FAM25, CA3, BHMT, HIBADH and ECHS1, involved in oxidation reduction, energy and lipid metabolism and amino acid metabolism, were identified as the most differentially expressed gene products across all of the experimental conditions of our chronic alcoholism model. Second, hierarchical clustering analysis showed CYP2E1 knockout played a primary role in the overall differential protein expression compared with ethanol and gender factors. Furthermore, pair-wise multiple comparisons have revealed that the only significant expression difference lied in wild-type and CYP2E1 knockout mice both treated with ethanol. Third, K-mean clustering analysis indicated that the CYP2E1 knockout had the reverse effect on ethanol induced oxidative stress and lipid oxidation. More importantly, IPA analysis of proteomic data inferred that the gene expressions of two upstream regulators, NRF2 and PPAR?, regulated by chronic alcohol feeding and CYP2E1 knockout, are involved in ethanol induced oxidative stress and lipid oxidation. The present study provides an effectively comprehensive data analysis strategy to compare multiple biological factors, contributing to biochemical effects of alcohol on the liver. The mass spectrometry proteomics data have been deposited to the ProteomeXchange with data set identifier of PXD000635.
