The Protein Man's Blog | A Discussion of Protein Research

Agarose beads are small spherical beads of agarose gel which are commonly used in gel filtration or molecular size exclusion chromatography and biomolecular purification and immobilization. These beads act as porous gel to filter mixtures of molecules based on their individual sizes. And since these beads are easy to activate, they can also be used to bind biomolecules in a reversible or irreversible manner. In addition, their inert nature and unique internal surface area can also be activated for ligand attachment, making them the ideal basis for various affinity chromatography beads such as protein A and G, and glutathione.

Basically, spectrophotometry is one of the most widely used analytical procedures in biochemistry. It is commonly used to estimate the level of an analyte in solution and is ideal for simple routine determination of small quantities of materials. This method is based on the two laws of light absorption by solutions, namely Lambert's Law and Beer's Law.

Tagging your protein of interest can be extremely useful since it simplifies the purification protocol, improves the yield and solubility of your protein of interest and promotes the proper folding of their fusion partners. Due to their versatility, affinity tags (peptide sequences that are appended to the target protein) are recognized as one of the most powerful tools that can be used for basic biological research and in structural and functional proteomics as well.

Due to the fact that nucleic acids carry genetic information and that proteins regulate various life processes, they are considered to be two of the most important biomolecules in any living organism. In addition, their interactions play a crucial role in most biological processes, which include everything from replication,transcription and recombination to enzymatic eventsusing nucleic acids as substrates. Taking all of these things into consideration, it is not surprising why protein-nucleic acids interactions have been the subject of intensive research for the past few years.