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

Extracting proteins from plant and animal sources are two different things. While animal proteins can easily be extracted, working with plant proteins can be quite a challenge. Why? Plant proteins are more difficult to extract since they are protected by a rigid cell wall that contains several interfering agents (i.e proteases).

As mentioned in our earlier posts, extracting, separating and identifying proteins from plant samples present a unique challenge since they contain significant amounts of proteases and other compounds that may interfere with the process. Generally, there are three critical aspects for successful protein separation:

Cell disruption is a collection of techniques used for releasing biomolecules of interest from inside the cell.  This blog will discuss the various techniques which will be broken down into two categories, gentle and harsh cell disruption, there relative advantages and which tissue types work best with the particular technique.  

When working on proteins, your sample biological materials should first be homogenized to ensure proper solubilization and extraction. This can be a challenge if you are trying to extract plant proteins because their tissues contain significant amounts of proteases, phosphatases and glycosidases which can interfere with the results. In addition, not all biological materials require the same technique so you should really be careful when choosing the technique that you would use.