High-throughput Three-dimensional Gel Electrophoresis for Versatile Utilities： A Stacked Slice-gel System for Separation and Reactions （4SR）

Introduction The completion of the Human Genome Project has triggered large-scale screening of genomes (1) and proteomes (2) in aims to find out candidate genes related to diseases (3), perform expression analyses at the mRNA level (4) or at the protein level (5), discover new drugs (6), and analyze molecular in- teractions (7). For such purposes, technologies han- dling a tiny amount of samples should be developed, of which the importance has already been described as the ambient analyte th…

High-throughput three-dimensional gel electrophoresis for versatile utilities: a stacked slice-gel system for separation and reactions (4SR)

A novel high-throughput system, called the stacked slice-gel system for separation and reactions (4SR), was developed for the analysis of DNA/RNA and protein/peptide. The system provides a novel three-dimensional gel electrophoresis approach that exploits the property of stacked slice gels. It allows multiple samples simultaneously to react as well as to be separated, offering a two-dimensional (mxn) sample loading system. For this purpose, high-throughput multi-micro vessels (MMVs) containing variable numbers of wells (100 wells in this paper) have been used, which are made of 25 mm square-size polyacrylamide gels. Furthermore, after electrophoretic separation, a slice gel containing a desired sample can be easily removed and proceeded to the next step. Different biological reactions as well as successive separation of products were effectively carried out dealing with DNA/RNA and protein/peptide. It shows that this system has a diversity of potentials to be developed.