Important question can someone help me?

Question

After several steps of protein purification, your protein yield is lower than you would expect. You suspect a large amount of autolysis (protein degradation) of your sample. How might you minimise this in your future experiments?

Answer 1

Hello Elena,

Hope this message finds you well!

I want to answer this question by asking some questions that I think would give youu a good starting point for your thinking.

1) What exactly does it mean for a protein to denature? Is this the same as degradation?

2) Once we know what denaturation is in more detail, if our protein yield went down due to protein degrdation, what did we do to promote this? Hint: Think about the method of separation: Column Chromatography, Sediment Coefficients, SDS-PAGE etc.

3) Knowing what we did to our protein, the methods we used, what are some things we could do or skip that may protect the protein strand?

I hope this helps!

If not, feel free to respond and let me know, so I may change my method.

-Jose