An overview of proteomic and metabolomic technologies and their application to pregnancy research.

'Omic' technologies represent a strategy towards high-throughput, simultaneous analysis of thousands of biological molecules. Their development has been accelerated in the post-genomic era since these molecules represent the interaction of genes and environment or the 'functional genome'. Omic domains are of particular interest in the search for predictive disease biomarkers and have additional relevance in understanding pathophysiology and the development of molecularly targeted therapeutics. This review examines the fields of proteomics and metabolomics in the context of obstetrics and gynaecology, including a discussion of methodology, challenges, potential applications and current research.

Plasma from women with preeclampsia inhibits trophoblast invasion.

To assess whether plasma from women with preeclampsia altered trophoblast invasion, SGHPL-4 extravillous trophoblasts were treated with pooled plasma from women with preeclampsia (PE-P; 10%) or with plasma from healthy pregnant controls (C-P). PE-P significantly inhibited SGHPL-4 invasion through Matrigel-coated transwells (P < .01), reduced mitochondrial dehydrogenase activity (P < .01), and increased apoptosis (P < .05); however, invading cells were no more susceptible to PE-P-induced apoptosis than their static counterparts. C-P did not alter rates of invasion, proliferation, or apoptosis. The bioactivity of PE-P was retained after removal of the 6 most abundant plasma proteins using an immunodepletion column (P < .05). Fractionation of PE-P demonstrated that the reduction in invasion was predominantly mediated by factors >100 kd in size. The authors conclude that plasma from women with preeclampsia contains multiple factors that inhibit invasion. These factors do not specifically target invading cells, but instead may reduce the number of cells available to invade.