B-35

N. V. Gopee¹ , R. D. Edmondson¹ , S. Thyparambil¹ , R. C. Jones¹ , J. T. Taylor¹ , W. G. Wamer² , P. C. Howard¹ , ¹NCTR, Jefferson, AR, ²CFSAN, College Park, MD

In response to a paucity of data on tattoo pigment toxicity, we have examined inguinal and axillary lymph node protein expression in female SKH-1 hairless mice following: no tattooing; tattooing with vehicle (10% aqueous glycerol); tattooing with either 20% w/v cadmium sulfide (CdS) or Pigment Red 22 (PR22) in vehicle.Mice were then held for 2 weeks and exposed for 13 weeks to 1.4 SED/day simulated solar light. The mice (3/group) were sacrificed and the axillary lymph nodes removed, combined, frozen, and pulverized in liquid-nitrogen.Duplicate samples from each group were separated using polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, the entire gel lane was excised into 30 bands, and each band subjected to in-gel trypsin digestion. The resulting peptides were analyzed using an automated nano-HPLC MS/MS system, and proteins were identified using the Mascot database search engine.ProteinTrack software (developed in-house) was used to filter the protein results. In this first report of murine lymph node proteome more than 1700 proteins were identified.Hierarchical analysis of the total protein expression demonstrated that the non-tattooed and control (aqueous glycerol) proteomes were significantly different (p<0.05).Protein expression in mice tattooed with PR22 or CdS were different from each other and from the vehicle control.Analysis of the altered genes as a result of tattooing with PR22 or CdS suggests there are changes in pathways involved in cell proliferation and inflammation.These results suggest (a) tattooing induces persistent changes in regional draining lymph node protein expression, (b) tattooing with PR22 and CdS induced changes above those detected with vehicle control.