Classification of alphal antitrypsin phenotypes by high-resolution two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-D PAGE)

Abstract

The ability of two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-D PAGE) to visualize soluble proteins is well documented (Anderson and Anderson 1977). By this tecnique, exploiting charge/mass differences to separate polypeptides, many polymorphic serum proteins were exactly located in 2-D PAGE maps of human serum (Anderson and Anderson 1979). The main advantages of this procedure are: first, a better molecular characterization of mutants is obtainable, secondly a simultaneous detection of several proteins is possible in the same slab gel;finally, the monitoring of non-conventional phenotypes,as the null variants (which would otherwise be difficult to detect) could be obtained (Asakawa et al. 1985).