The brain is the most complex organ of the human body, and the study of the different diseases and injuries that affect it is far behind the ones that affect other organs. Some of these pathologies such as neurodegenerative diseases, physical injuries, and cancer present an important alteration in its inflammatory component, which affects their outcome in a positive or negative way. For this reason, it is important to characterize the joint expression of the cytokines and growth factors (GF) that are part of this inflammatory component. The cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is in direct contact with the brain and spinal cord, being the best biofluid to study the cytokine and GF secretion patterns of these conditions. Currently, the proteomic workflows based on mass spectrometry (MS) are unable to easily detect these proteins in CSF. In this chapter, we describe a method based on cytokine membrane arrays to characterize, in a straightforward way, the secretion profile of different cytokines and GF at once in CSF.
Keywords: CSF; Cytokines; Inflammation; Neurobiology; Protein array.