A microgel system for disc electrophoresis

Disc electrophoresis has provided a suitable method for separating macromolecules (Davis, 1964; Ornstein, 1964). Numerous authors (2,5-10, 12) have presented scaled-down versions which were not directly comparable to the standard separations. In the present study, we attempted to modify the scaled-down procedure by a minimum number of departures from the standard procedure to produce separations which would be directly comparable to the standard separations. We have used the character of the separation of the slow haptoglobins of human serum relative to albumin and transferrin to gauge the performance of our scaled-down procedure. This paper presents a microtechnique which permits the analysis and resolution of serum proteins typical of the standard procedure but with an approximately 20 times reduction in the size of the required protein samples.