Electrophoresis Apparatus, Gels Aid In Specialized Studies

FOR MULTIPLE RUNS: ISS’s Mini-6 Gel Device can run up to six gels simultaneously. In 1897, Russian physicist Ferdinand Ruess watched as clay colloidal particles moved within clay attached to electrodes, in what may have been the first application of what is today termed electrophoresis. In the 1930s, Arne Wilhelm Kaurin Tiselius developed methods to measure the amounts on an abnormal protein in the urine of multiple myeloma patients. That work earned him a Nobel Prize in 1948, and the

Written byJames Kling

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FOR MULTIPLE RUNS: ISS’s Mini-6 Gel Device can run up to six gels simultaneously.

In 1897, Russian physicist Ferdinand Ruess watched as clay colloidal particles moved within clay attached to electrodes, in what may have been the first application of what is today termed electrophoresis. In the 1930s, Arne Wilhelm Kaurin Tiselius developed methods to measure the amounts on an abnormal protein in the urine of multiple myeloma patients. That work earned him a Nobel Prize in 1948, and the detection methods vaulted electrophoresis to a critical position in biological research.

Electrophoresis has come a long way since scientists first took notice of the effects electric fields have on matter. "Virtually every bio laboratory uses an electrophoretic method," says Johann Bauer, a cell biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry at Martinsried, Germany, and author of Cell Electrophoresis (Boca Raton, Fla., CRC Press, 1994).

Electrophoresis can handle separation of ...

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