Advances in the separation of bacteriophages and related particles

Nondenaturing gel electrophoresis is used to both characterize multimolecular particles and determine the assembly pathways of these particles. Characterization of bacteriophage-related particles has yielded strategies for characterizing multimolecular particles in general. Previous studies have revealed means for using nondenaturing gel electrophoresis to determine both the effective radius and the average electrical surface charge density of any particle. The response of electrophoretic mobility to increasing the magnitude of the electrical field is used to detect rod-shaped particles. To increase the capacity of nondenaturing gel electrophoresis to characterize comparatively large particles, some current research is directed towards either determining the structure of gels used for electrophoresis or inducing steric trapping of particles in dead-end regions within the fibrous network that forms a gel. A trapping-dependent technique of pulsed-field gel electrophoresis is presented with which a DNA-protein complex can be made to electrophoretically migrate in a direction opposite to the direction of migration of protein-free DNA.