Rapid and Sensitive Method to Detect Oxidized Forms of rhGCSF Using Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer

Abstract

Oxidation of methionine of human granulocyte colony stimulating factor (GCSF) results in loss of biological activity. In this study, we report the use of an Agilent 2100 bioanalyzer to detect oxidized forms of rhGCSF after exposure to hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂). Our data show that the bioanalyzer is capable of detecting minor changes in rhGCSF after oxidation with 0.01% (w/v) H₂O₂, which results in nearly 50% loss in biological activity as observed by cell (NFS-60) proliferation assay. Dithiothreitol could largely protect such a H₂O₂-mediated oxidation, and thus, we conclude that the major modification of GCSF upon methionine oxidation is the conversion of methionines to its sulfoxide.     

Nanolitre droplet array for real time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction

Recently, more and more effort has been put into the miniaturization of genetic tests such as quantitative PCR (qPCR), because it is no doubt a powerful tool for molecular diagnosis and quantitative biology. In this paper, we developed a low density nanolitre droplet array generated on a chemical modified silicon chip for gene quantification. Reliable and sensitive two step real time qRT-PCR assay for microRNA measurement was performed within 500 nL droplets. It has a dynamic range of six orders of magnitude, allowing for the quantification of microRNA input from 10(3) to 10(9) copies per reaction. We successfully applied the platform for quantitative measurement of mir-122 across five cultured cell lines. The minimum total RNA input was as low as 1 pg per assay, which showed great potential for gene quantification at single cell level. We envision the droplet based qPCR chip would be a universal and low-cost platform for gene quantification in ordinary biological laboratories.