News Release

Picking entire lanes from a 1D polyacrylamide gel

New application for the ProPic II

ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN JUNE 5, 2007 -- The ProPic II is an automated platform for use with electrophoresis gels and is capable of both image acquisition and excision of protein features. While this instrument boasts an excellent reputation for accurate picking of protein spots from two-dimensional (2D) gels, it is little known that the same high performance spot excision can be applied to one-dimensional (1D) gels also.

With 1D gels, researchers are interested in excision of entire bands or even entire lanes, including unstained portions potentially containing low abundance proteins. Spots from the same band are pooled by the ProPic II and can then be subjected to in-gel digestion and analyzed by mass spectrometry for protein identification.

Picking and harvesting an entire lane from a 1D gel has the benefit of allowing the analysis of all the proteins in a given sample, including those that otherwise might be missed due to low abundance or poor staining.

An example of this new application can be seen at ASMS 2007 in the following poster presentation:

Session MPZ6/Slot 503: Comparative Proteomics Study of Horse Seminal Proteins Using MALDI-MS and MS/MS to Gain Insight into Fertility by William K. Russell (presenting author) et al.

The authors of this poster used 2D gel electrophoresis to analyze horse seminal plasma. They found that many of the proteins observed in the resulting 2D gels were either post-translationally modified or present in several isoforms as the same proteins were found in multiple spots. In order to reduce some of this complexity the authors employed 1D PAGE in addition to 2D gel electrophoresis for complementary analysis.

After electrophoresis and staining, the ProPic II was used for excision of entire lanes from the 1D gels as described above. Subsequent automatic in-gel digestion was carried out with the ProGest followed by use of the ProMS to clean up the resulting peptide mixtures and spot them onto MALDI targets for further mass spectrometric analysis.

Come visit us at ASMS – find out how our solutions can accelerate your proteomic research Booth #96, Hospitality Suite "House", Westin Hotel

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