Protein biomarkers provide the key diagnostic information for the detection of disease, risk of disease progression, and a patient's likely response to drug therapy. Potential biomarkers exist in biofluids, such as serum, urine, and cerebrospinal fluid. Unfortunately, discovering and validating protein biomarkers are hindered by the presence of high-molecular-weight proteins, such as serum albumin and immunoglobulins, which comprise 90% of the proteins present in these samples. High-abundance, high-molecular-weight proteins mask the low-molecular-weight (LMW) proteins and peptides using conventional protein detection methods. Candidate biomarkers are believed to exist in very low concentrations and comprise less than 1% of serum proteins, and may be highly labile as well. Therefore, it is imperative to isolate and enrich LMW proteins from complex mixtures for biomarker discovery. This chapter describes a continuous -elution electrophoresis method, based on molecular weight sieving, to isolate specific molecular weight fractions for mass spectrometric, western blotting, or protein array analysis. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.
CITATION STYLE
Vanmeter, A. J., Camerini, S., Polci, M. L., Tessitore, A., Trivedi, N., Heiby, M., … Zhou, W. (2012). Serum low-molecular-weight protein fractionation for biomarker discovery. Methods in Molecular Biology, 823, 237–249. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-60327-216-2_15
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