Detection of Proteins on Two-Dimensional Electrophoresis Gels

Abstract

In 2-D electrophoresis, the second dimension is most commonly the SDS separation. Consequently, detection on 2-D gels uses the methods developed for SDS gels. However, some issues which are often not so important in I-D electrophoresis must be carefully taken care of in proteome-based approaches. Apart from the detection threshold, which is always a very important parameter, these issues include the dynamic range of detection, the linearity, the reproducibility between different staining experiments and the inter-protein variability. In addition, the interfacing of the staining methods with subsequent protein analysis methods (microsequencing, amino acid analysis, mass spectrometry) is more and more often an important parameter.