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Protein Characterisation Gel
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Separation of the structural (and sometimes non structural) polypeptides of FMD viruses on polyacrylamide gels has been used to determine possible relationships.
Two techniques have been employed, SDS-PAGE, which separates proteins
partly by their molecular weight and partly by their interaction with
SDS (Laemmli, 1970) (Protein
Characterisation Gel), and electrofocusing, which separates proteins by
their isoelectric potential. Normally the viral proteins would be radiolabelled
using 35S-methionine to allow easy detection by autoradiography.
A number of studies describing the relationships between FMD viruses have
been published using SDS-PAGE (Robson
et al., 1979; Knowles
and Hedger, 1985) or electrofocusing (King
et al., 1983).
However, only a limited amount of information can be gained from these methods and they have now largely been superseded by nucleotide sequence determination.
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