The Use of Microchannel Electrophoresis to Understand Amyloid Aggregation

Amyloids are involved in a variety of diseases including Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s disease, and diabetes. A number of technical challenges exist for the quantitative analysis of the different sizes of amyloid proteins which are present during the early stages of aggregation, therefore requiring new technologies to be developed for enhanced protein separations. Microchannel electrophoretic techniques have emerged as powerful tools for the quantitative analysis of proteins. In this study, we investigated the ability of CE to monitor the early stages of amyloid aggregation using insulin and amyloid beta as model amyloid-forming proteins. The effect of solutions conditions, including pH and ionic strength, on lag time and aggregate size have been determined.