EN
Central retinal lesions lead to loss of visual input in the central part of area 17 of the adult cat. Eventually this results in topographic map reorganization within the sensory-deprived cortical lesion projection zone (LPZ) as measured by electrophysiology. This recovery coincides with changes in gene/protein expression. We therefore investigated these alterations as a function of post-lesion survival time in three regions of primary visual area 17: the center of the LPZ, the border of the LPZ and far peripheral area 17. We analysed the differential protein expression patterns between control and experimental animals with 2-dimensional differential gel electrophoresis. We have traced 74 differential spots for the three regions in area 17. Central retinal lesions clearly induced region-specifi c and time-dependent protein expression changes. Even the protein expression in far peripheral area 17 spared from a direct impact of the central retinal lesions differed from the corresponding region in normal subjects. We succeeded in identifying 93% of the differential spots by means of mass spectrometry and software processing helped functional grouping within the list of proteins. This analysis allowed us to select two plasticity-related proteins for further validation experiments.