Multi-protein detection of endothelial cell inflammation and single cells\u27 heterogeneity study

Endothelial inflammation plays major roles in all phases of atherosclerotic process and both innate immunity and endothelial adhesion molecules contribute to endothelial inflammation. In this thesis, there are three main parts regarding the endothelial cell inflammation and multiple protein detection. In the first part, we applied multiple antibodies (Abs) to measure changes in expression levels of six proteins in response to inflammatory stimulation, and we observed different dynamic behaviors in them. In the second part, we applied emission fingerprinting technique provided by Zeiss LSM 510 META detector, and achieved the concurrent detection of ten proteins expressed on the same endothelial cell sample. In the third part, in order to reveal cell-cell heterogeneity, we quantified the histograms of six proteins within a cell population, noise and noise strength of these protein histograms, and correlation coefficients of these proteins as functions of TNF-alpha stimulation time respectively