Analysis of αB-crystallin polydispersity in solution through native microfluidic electrophoresis

Analyst. 2019 Jul 21;144(14):4413-4424. doi: 10.1039/c9an00382g. Epub 2019 Jun 19.

Abstract

In recent years, significant advancements have been made in the understanding of the population distributions and dynamic oligomeric states of the molecular chaperone αB-crystallin and its core domain variants. In this work, we provide solution-phase evidence of the polydispersity of αB-crystallin using microfluidic methods, used for separating the oligomeric species present in solution according to their different electrophoretic mobilities on-chip in a matter of seconds. We in particular demonstrate that microfluidic high-field electrophoresis and diffusion can detect the oligomerisation of these highly dynamic molecular chaperones and characterise the dominant oligomeric species present. We thereby provide a robust microfluidic method for characterising the individual species within complex protein mixtures of biological relevance.