Electrophoresis chain conformation

Stothard, J.R., Frame, IA. and Miles, MA. (1997) Use of polymerase chain reaction-based single strand conformational polymorphism and denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis methods for detection of sequence variation of ribosomal DNA of Trypanosoma cruzi. International Journal for Parasitology 27, 339-343. 

In the most powerful technique for resolving protein mixtures, proteins are exposed to the ionic detergent SDS (sodium dodecylsulfate) before and during gel electrophoresis (Figure 3-32). SDS denatures proteins, causing multimeric proteins to dissociate into their subunits, and all polypeptide chains are forced into extended conformations with similar charge mass ratios. SDS treatment thus... 

Barros F, Laren MV, Salas A, Carracedo A (1997). Rapid and enhanced detection of mitochondrial DNA using single-strand conformation analysis of superposed restriction enzyme fragments from polymerase chain-reaction ampUfied products. Electrophoresis, 18 52-54. 

Gasser RB, Monti JR, ZhuX, Chilton NB, HungG-C, Guldberg P (1997). Polymerase chain reaction-linked single-strand conformation polymorphism of ribosomal DNA to fingerprint parasites. Electrophoresis, 18 1564—1566. 

Two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (2D-PAGE), which has been successfully used to establish a correlation between adsorbed proteins and in vivo behavior of polystyrene carriers coated with Poloxamers (Blunk etal, 1994) could be a helpful tool to study competitive plasma protein adsorption on PEG-coated nanospheres as a function of PEG chain length and surface density. Indeed, the relevance of the adsorbed plasma proteins (and their ratios and conformations) with respect to the in vivo fate of the particles remains to be uncovered. 

Second, the fact that the LD orientation factor relaxes very quickly, ruling out unbiased reptation as a mechanism, indicates that the chain is not in equilibrium in its tube during continuous-field electrophoresis. The intra-tube tension, which may be due to gel inhomogeneities and tube leakages for example, is released very quickly when the field is turned off probably because this involves mainly local motion. However, the overall tube conformation cannot be renewed by these intra-tube modes. 

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