Though well traveled, the road to two-dimensional gel analysis can be slow going. Pierce Biotechnology in Rockford, Ill., has looked to the past in developing four new sample preparation kits for nuclear, membrane, soluble, and insoluble proteins. According to the company, these kits reduce preparation time and improve gel-to-gel reproducibility.
All four kits remove salts from extracted proteins and concentrate them to produce a sample suitable for electrophoresis on an immobilized pH gradient strip. "What we have done is to use basically an old method," says Pierce research scientist Betsy Benton. "Desalting has been around forever."
But desalting by the traditional methods of precipitation and dialysis is a lengthy and troublesome process. Pierce's sample preparation kits instead use spin columns, a procedure that takes only about 15 minutes. Convenience is not the only advantage, according to Benton. Pierce's preparation process never takes the proteins out of solution, so resolubilization is ...
