Fast way to find out how freezing affects proteins
A recent project by the Portuguese research institute IBMC and the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Strasbourg, has shown that the DynaPro Titan range of dynamic light scattering (DLS) instruments from Wyatt Technology can be used to determine whether freezing alters a macromolecule's homogeneity.
The findings of this analysis are of particular interest for protein characterisation applications. This is because with certain proteins the biological activity disappears after being stored in a frozen state, possibly due to aggregation. IBMC and CNRS used the DynaPro to verify the protein quality before reproducible investigations were undertaken on the sample.
The results demonstrated that some proteins do aggregate upon freezing. It has also shown that the DLS system offers a direct and less in-vasive method to answer, within minutes, the question of whether freezing will alter a particular macromolecule's homogeneity.