Microscale Solution Isoelectric Focusing as an Effective Strategy Enabling Containment of Hemeoglobin-Derived Products for High-Resolution Gel-Based Analysis of the Plasmodium falciparum Proteome

The high hemeozoin (beta-hemeatin) content of Plasmodium falciparum lysates imposes severe limitations on the analysis of the malarial proteome, in particular compromising the loading capacities of two-dimensional gels. Here we report on the adaptation of a recently developed solution-phase isoelectric focusing-based fractionation technique as a prefractionation strategy for efficient containment of hemeoglobin-derived products and complexity reduction, to facilitate the high-resolution gel-based quantitative analysis of plasmodial lysates. Keywords: malaria • proteomics • serine hydroxymethyltransferase • two-dimensional gel electrophoresis • quantitation