Gel documentation is a process that is performed in equipment that allows you to observe, take pictures and analyze the bands on the gels after protein electrophoresis. This equipment allows you to visualize bands in the gels that are not visible to the naked eye, as these devices have high resolution and focusing lenses that improve the results.

This gel documentation has the great advantage of reducing the user’s operating time and, as a result, higher quality results are obtained than those obtained by conventional methods. Thanks to technological development, gel documentation systems are now available, specially designed to adapt to the needs of each laboratory, offering innovative solutions for protein image capture and analysis.

What is protein purification?

Protein purification consists of a series of steps, which aim to isolate a single type of protein from a complex mixture. This technique is essential for the characterization of function, structure and interactions.

The starting material is generally a biological tissue or a microbial culture. This purification is carried out in a succession of steps that can be summarized:

• Extract the protein from the matrix that confines it.
• Separate the protein and non-protein parts of the mixture.
• Separate the desired protein from other proteins.

Steps in the purification of a protein

• Create a crude protein extract: Crude intracellular protein extracts are prepared by lysing cells, using chemical or mechanical processes. Extracellular proteins are obtained by centrifuging the solution and removing the cells.
• Intermediate purification: This can be done by precipitating the proteins with a highly concentrated salt such as ammonium sulfate. The protein salts are then passed through a semi-permeable membrane in a step known as dialysis or subjected to chromatography or gel exclusion filtration.
• Final purification: It is performed by affinity chromatography, electrophoresis on polyacrylamide gel or immunotransfer.

It is important to note that gel electrophoresis is one of the most important tools in molecular, cellular and biochemical laboratories. In fact, it continues to be one of the main approvals and tests requested when publishing important results in a scientific journal. For this reason, researchers need high-resolution and multiple image recognition systems to process gels. From this point of view, gel processing requires the highest sensitivity to ensure the quality of the results.

What is the purpose of protein electrophoresis?

Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis is used to discover the purity of a protein sample. Samples that are to be analyzed are then loaded into tiny wells on the gel using a pipette. Once the charge is ready, an electric current of 50-150 V is applied. Now the charged molecules present in the sample start to migrate through the gel towards the electrodes, depending on their net charge, this allows the proteins to be separated according to their migration speed, which in turn depends directly on their charge and inversely on the friction coefficient, which in turn depends on the size, shape of the protein and viscosity of the medium. The strips are immediately inspected or photographed for future reference.

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