Swiss company Tecan is marketing the first two instruments in its ProTeam™ product line, intended to help automate "the complete proteomics street," from sample fractionation to mass spectrometry (MS) sample preparation, according to Christoph Eckerskorn, chief scientific officer of Tecan Proteomics.
Traditionally, proteomics researchers prepare crude protein extracts from the cells or tissues under study, separate the proteins on two-dimensional (2D) gels, compare the protein patterns between two gels, and choose proteins whose levels have changed. They then identify and characterize these proteins using MS. Generally, Eckerskorn says, as many as 2,000 individual proteins can be visualized in this manner. The problem, he says, is that a cell contains at least 100,000 proteins; those missing proteins "are below the tip of the iceberg, the low-abundance proteins."
The ProTeam FFE (free-flow electrophoresis) is designed to address this problem. Eckerskorn describes FFE as "gel electrophoresis without the gel." Up to gram-sized quantities ...
