The separation and purification of cells, viruses and viral particles, proteins and other biological components has long been a costly and timeconsuming endeavor, both in clinical and research laboratories and in industrial applications. Focus Research has developed a modification of a selective, high resolution analytical technique for the separation of such compounds, based on the principle of isoelectric focusing. The modification has several advantages over existing techniques: it has very high capacity and can be used in a continuous, flow-through fashion; it can use common, inexpensive buffer reagents; it produces shallower pH gradients, with resulting higher resolution, than existing techniques; and the pH gradient may be altered at will during the focusing run to achieve maximal separation of one or more components from a given starting material. The goal of the proposed research is to optimize this procedure for use in both analytical and industrial-scale applications.
Its specific aims are to produce a more powerful and sophisticated electronics package, and to investigate the use of the technique in focusing channels of various configurations in order to optimize its effectiveness. Also, a wide range of buffers will be tested for their efficacy in establishing and maintaining pH gradients.
