Dr Ryan Jensen of California University has used Bio-Rad's Mini-Protean TGX (Tris-Glycine Extended) precast gels to analyse the biochemistry of the full-length BRCA2 protein.
Jensen, Davis and colleagues reported the first purification of full-length BRCA2 protein in a paper published online on 22 August in the 'Nature' journal.
Proper study of the product of the BRCA2 gene, mutations of which lead to breast and ovarian cancers, has eluded research groups for years owing to challenges preventing its purification.
The protein is large (3,418 amino acids), has low expression levels and has a tendency to degrade.
Prior to using Mini-Protean TGX gels, Jensen used his own hand-cast polyacrylamide gels to trace the purification of BRCA2.
During many of these attempts, the higher molecular weight proteins - including BRCA2 - disappeared.
Once Jensen began using the Mini-Protean TGX gels, he consistently observed tight, crisp bands corresponding to BRCA2.
Jensen said: 'When I hand-poured my gels to analyse the purification of BRCA2, I wasn't always confident that it would show up.
'With Bio-Rad's TGX gels, I could count on the fact that BRCA2 would show up every time,' he added.
The Mini-Protean TGX gels are based on a modification of the Laemmli buffer system, which increases gel matrix stability and performance over time.
This modification extends the gel shelf life to more than 12 months and offers excellent resolution and reproducibility, according to Bio-Rad.
Researchers can run gels to completion in as little as 12 minutes.
For Jensen, an additional advantage over other precast gels was that he could use the standard, low-cost Tris/Glycine/SDS buffers for sample loading and running.
Other precast gels require customised buffers.
'The TGX gels provide a facile solution for producing publication-quality figures,' said Jensen.
He was able to perform downstream techniques such as Western blotting with reproducible results.
Jensen also said that using Bio-Rad's precast gels prevented user contamination that could potentially interfere with mass spectrometric analysis when using hand-cast gels.
