An electrophoretic study of normal and post-mortem human and bovine synovial fluids

Electrophoretic studies of normal and post-mortem human synovial fluids showed no appreciable difference in their electrophoretic characteristics, but both differ in some characteristics from traumatic and arthritic fluids. A new rapidly moving peak was found frequently in the patterns for normal and post-mortem fluids and occasionally in bovine synovial fluids. This has been called the π peak. Bovine synovial fluid differed from the human fluids in respect to the number of protein components present.The “protein” content of the normal fluids agreed with the few values previously reported (2.8 g./100 ml.). The “protein” content of bovine synovial fluid was approximately one-third of the value obtained for the normal human fluids. The post-mortem human fluids have a total nitrogen value similar to the normal fluid value, but the NPN value for the post-mortem fluids was approximately three times that of the normal fluids.