Want to get rid of the pains of manual protein purification once and for all? With automated protein purification you can stop worrying about your sample and your time. Don't spend the whole evening waiting for your precious protein to elute! Let us look at some examples of manual purification hassles and how switching to an automated system can relieve your pains.
Top three manual protein purification hassles that automation can overcome:
Hassle #1. Manual protein purification is time-consuming.
Manual purification means staying in the lab until the process is done as you need to continually monitor the purification progress. Several hands-on tasks eat up your time during this process. Some examples are handling large volumes, manually collecting fractions, and checking fractions on a separate UV spectrophotometer.
Hassle #2. Manual protein purification severely limits throughput.
Going from equilibrating a column to analyzing eluted fractions can take hours, even if the process proceeds smoothly. Add in the inevitable column clogging, unplanned interruptions, and conflicts with the rest of the day’s scheduled activities, and the process can take all day. This wait can interfere with the ability to use the purified protein for its intended purpose and can limit throughput to one or two preparations per day.
Hassle #3. Reaching sufficient purity and yield can be an issue.
When you are manually collecting fractions it is a struggle to ensure you have enough of purified protein for your next step. If you pool too many fractions, the target protein will be diluted and more contaminants can be present. If you pool too few, the amount of your target in the sample might be too low for moving ahead.
Want to know what switching to automated purification can do to help? Here are some solutions from our smallest bench-top system, ÄKTA start:
- Major reduction in “hands-on/eyes-on” time
- Easy to load and run large sample volumes
- Automated fraction collection and analysis
Find out more by visiting the ÄKTA start product page.
Are you working with manual purification and have experienced other problems that you would like to discuss? Post your comment below or join one of our discussion forums.