2D gel electrophoresis of insulin secretory granule proteins from biosynthetically labelled pancreatic islets

Abstract

Pulse radiolabelling of cells with radioactive amino acids such is a common method for investigating the biosynthetic rates of proteins. In this way, the abundance of newly synthesized proteins can be determined by several proteomic techniques including 2D gel electrophoresis (2DE). This chapter describes a protocol for labelling pancreatic islets with 35S-methionine in the presence of low and high concentrations of glucose, followed by subcellular fractionation enrichment of secretory granule proteins and analysis of the granule protein contents by 2DE. This demonstrated that the biosynthetic rates of most of the granule proteins are co-ordinately regulated in the presence of stimulatory glucose concentrations.