This study was undertaken to identify differences in protein expression profiles between superficial bladder transitional cell carcinoma (BTCC) and normal urothelial cells. We used laser capture microdissection (LCM) to harvest purified cells, and used two-dimensional liquid chromatography (2D-LC) followed by electrospray ionization-tandem mass spectrometry (ESI-MS/MS) to separate and identify the peptide mixture. A total of 440/438 proteins commonly appeared in 4 paired specimens. Multi-step bioinformatic procedures were used for the analysis of identified proteins; 175/179 of the 293/287 proteins that were specific expressed in tumor/normal cells own gene ontology (GO) biological process annotation. Compared with the entire list of the international protein index (IPI), there are 52/46 GO terms exhibited as enriched and 6/10 exhibited as depleted, respectively. Significantly altered pathways between tumor and normal cells mainly include oxidative phosphorylation, focal adhesion, etc. Finally, descriptive statistics show that the shotgun proteomics strategy has practice directive significance for biomarker discovery by two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE) technology.