New process speeds protein ...( ANN ARBOR---A new process developed at ...)

ANN ARBOR---A new process developed at the University of Michigan separates cellular proteins in hours instead of the days that previous methods required, an advance that could greatly aid efforts to understand how normal cells function and what goes awry in diseases such as cancer.

"Although DNA is the blueprint, proteins are the workhorses of cells; they actually carry out the functions," says U-M chemistry Prof. David M. Lubman, who licensed the technology to Eprogen Inc., of Darien, Ill. The process, called ProteoSepTM, uses conventional high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) techniques and could be "a real winner for the pharmaceutical industry," where HPLC already is widely used, says Lubman. The method has the potential to help researchers understand how various drugs affect protein expression in the cell and how cellular proteins change as a cell turns cancerous. It may also eventually help physicians predict the course of a particular patient's disease and decide how to treat it.

Currently, scientists typically use two-dimensional gel electrophoresis, a tricky and time-consuming procedure, to extract individual proteins from the complex assortment of proteins in cells. In the first step, prepared samples are dabbed onto a gel and exposed to an electric field, which separates the various proteins on the basis of their charges. Next, the proteins are sorted in the second dimension by molecular weight, still in a gel matrix. The result is a 2-D "map" of separate protein spots. Such maps can be used, for example, to pinpoint protein changes that are peculiar to specific types of cancer or to identify unique markers for a particular cell type or disease state. While gel electrophoresis is widely used, it has drawbacks: at least two full days are required to complete the separation in two dimensions, and reproducibility of results is often poor. What's more, the technique has its limits as an identification tool because the protei
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Contact: Nancy Ross-Flanigan
rossflan@umich.edu
734-647-1853
University of Michigan
15-Apr-2002

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