pH fractionation and identification of proteins: comparing column chromatofocusing versus liquid isoelectric focusing techniques

In proteomic investigations, a number of different separation techniques can be applied to fractionate whole cell proteomes into more manageable fractions for subsequent analysis. In this work, utilizing HPLC and mass spectrometry for protein identification, two different fractionation methods were compared and contrasted to determine the potential of each method for the simple and reproducible fractionation of a bacterial proteome. Column-based chromatofocusing and liquid-based isoelectric focusing both utilized pH gradients to produce similar results in terms of the numbers of proteins successfully identified (402 and 378 proteins) and the consistency of proteins identified from one experiment to the next (<10% change). However, there was limited overlap in the protein sets with <50% of the proteins identified as common between the sets of proteins identified by the different systems. In addition to the numbers of proteins identified and consistency of those identified, the reduced monetary costs of experimentation and increased assay flexibility produced by using isoelectric focusing was considered in order to adopt a system best suited for comparative proteomic projects.