Even though these results are very much in concordance with overall results from studies on other malignancies, the present results are novel related to ovarian carcinomas and need to be confirmed. The different transcriptional profiles for clear cell carcinomas and serous carcinomas are in agreement with distinct tumourigenetic pathways for these carcinomas and also consistent with other studies. Although the present study is based on a limited patient cohort of only three subgroups of ovarian carcinomas, the strong association of two of the mRNAs with histology, stage and outcome suggest that they may have potential as cancer markers. Clinical and laboratory information was collected from hospital records and additional preoperative patient interviews, shown in Table S1. All patients and controls were of Western European descent, postmenopausal and had no diseases influencing survival other than the ovarian cancer. All patients but four were primarily operated by at least a total hysterectomy or a uterus amputation, a bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy and an omentectomy. No patients received neoadjuvant chemotherapy, whereas all patients but three received adjuvant chemotherapy. The effect of treatment was evaluated by clinical examinations and serum CA125 measurements at minimum. The principle environmental conditions of pH and temperature constitute important signals leading to alterations in gene transcription and protein expression thought to facilitate the bacterial transmission process from tick to mammalian host. For example, the temperature and pH environment of the Ixodes tick midgut is altered following a blood meal. In addition to the principle environmental conditions of temperature and pH, a multitude of host related factors, for example those derived from blood from tick feeding, have been demonstrated to have effects on gene transcription and protein expression in vitro and likely play an important role in vivo. Although gel-based proteomics strategies have been employed to investigate the dynamics of the B. burgdorferi proteome, these pioneering studies identified only a limited number of proteins. As a result, insights into the global changes in protein expression based on changing environmental conditions were limited. The present study explores the effect of changing principle environmental conditions where there is a wealth of previously published orthogonal transcriptomic data allowing for comparative Erlotinib analyses. Here, we present a non-gel, mass spectrometry-based study of the global changes in the proteome of the well-characterized infectious B31 strain of B. burgdorferi in response to culture conditions analogous in part to what the organism experiences during its life cycle, e.g., growth in the unfed or fed tick vectors.