The Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York is using Dyversity, Syngene's 2D gel imaging system, to help understand the proteomic basis of human aging.
Scientists in the Departments of Medicine and Molecular Genetics at the college are isolating proteins from the serum of Ashkenazi Jewish centenarians, their offspring and age-matched offspring controls.
The proteins are extracted and then run on 1D gels stained with Coomassie blue and are also transferred onto Western blots, probed with different antibodies and then stained with horseradish peroxidase.
The 1D protein gels and Western blots produced are imaged and analysed using a Dyversity system, enabling researchers to detect specific proteins and establish if these are connected with a longer life.
Dr Cagdas Tazearslan, research associate at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said: 'We installed this system because we needed to accurately detect small amounts of proteins and also assess phosphorylation levels of different signal transduction molecules that may have an impact on the human aging-process.
'By using the Dyversity we have been able to rapidly generate reproducible image data to measure how different IGF1R gene variants found in centenarians differentially modulate phosphorylation levels of downstream kinases and transcription factors.
'By using Dyversity, we are able to avoid saturation problems experienced when using X-ray films, therefore we have more confidence in the band quantification.'
