What do you say about using 2-D proteomics?

1 January 2006

Dennis Kreinfeldt

Whilst potentially very powerful, I think the early pioneers of 2D electrophoresis underestimated the sheer number of permutations of post translational modifications. So, instead of having to map just several thousand membrane protein spots on a 2D gel (which could be manageable), I think you could have to map 30-300,000 protein spots. To elaborate on this, there's a company called apollo cytokine research which routinely analyses it's soluble versions of membrane receptors by 2D electrophoresis - the results are quite spectacular, you can have as many as 20 different spots on a 2D gel, each reflecting unique glycosylation species (or glycoforms). And this is just one protein!