Preparative Scale Electrophoresis

Abstract

The design of the equipment used for preparative scale electrophoresis (EP) depends principally on the amount of purified protein required for a particular application. Should it be required to raise antibodies, for example, then the amount required may be low and capable of being obtained by isolating the protein from analytical equipment. This level of preparation will be discussed only briefly. When larger quantities are required, limited scale-up of analytical equipment may suffice, providing the problem of heat dissipation, which is an intrinsic byproduct of electrophoresis, can be surmounted. Other factors are the complexity of the sample, and the separation between the component of interest and the impurities. In general, the more complex the mixture, the smaller (for the most part) the size of sample possible to process in a given run. For large-scale preparation, i.e., grams and larger quantities, simple scale-up is impossible, and over the last decade several elegant solutions to this problem have been proposed. These have necessitated the design of novel equipment that has successfully eliminated the three major problems in electrophoresis; namely, Joule heat, convection, and hydrodynamics.