jculp at egreen.wednet.edu wrote:
>Hello everyone,
>>I am looking for a new protein purification lab for my high school students.
> Our equipment and supplies are limited. We have a couple of specs and ability
> to do chromatography. Does anyone have any suggestions? I understand that
> this is very general question. Please let me know if you have any thoughts on
> this.
On top of colored stuff suggested I have the following (also hemoglobin but
purifying anything from blood of any type might not be PC in high school?):
Lysozyme from eggs. Crystallization directly from whites is easy as pie and
does not require chromatography. If inclusion of chromatography is desired,
either gel-filtration (can be done with crushed and sized agarose) or ion exchange
(CM cellulose is inexpensive) or hydroxylapatite (extremely easy and cheap
to make) can be used to get truly ~99% pure protein.
Casein and/or ovalubumin from non-fat dry milk. Not only easy and cheap
but also goes long way in educational value (things about bacteria/cheese/yeasts,
etc flow naturally).
"Purifying" actin to an extent that you can demonstrate polymerization
is quite feasible too: meat/salts/acetone and a bit of ATP is all it takes.
A wild case of affinity chromatography can be made by purifying chitin-binding
lectins on a column made from boilde, dried and grinded crab shells.
It's hard to be more specific at this point. Perhaps you can search for
the web for "amateur science", +"home lab" +protein +purification, etc.
At least some hits are bound to be good. I know I've seen some designs
of microcentrifuge out of kitchen mixer and 37C incubator out of
pet store heater with termocouple.
DK
