Protein recovery from the all-agarose ProSieve gel system

Electrophoresis in polyacrylamide gels is one of the most powerful tools used for the analysis of proteins. However, this technique is not widely used for protein purification for a variety of reasons such as the following: less than quantitative recoveries; involved, time-consuming methodologies; and impurities in the protein preparations from gel-polymerization by-products that can modify the proteins and interfere with subsequent experiments. As an alternative, we have developed a simple and quantitative recovery procedure for proteins separated by electrophoresis in the all-agarose ProSieve gel system. Using this procedure, greater than 90% of each protein examined was recovered, and these proteins were unaffected by the recovery procedure.