Serial displacement chromatofocusing and its applications in multidimensional chromatography and gel electrophoresis: II. Experimental results.

Part I of this study investigated the theory and basic characteristics of "serial displacement chromatofocusing" (SDC). In Part II of this study, SDC is applied to two prototype applications which have potential uses in proteomics and related areas involving the analysis of complex analyte mixtures. In the first application, SDC was used as a prefractionation method prior to two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (2D-PAGE) to separate a human prostate cancer cell lysate. It was observed that the resolution achieved in narrow-pI-range 2D-PAGE was improved when using SDC prefractionation, so that SDC may be useful as a low-cost, high-speed, and highly scalable alternative to electrophoretic prefractionation methods for 2D-PAGE. The second application involves the use of SDC as the first dimension, and reversed-phase chromatography as the second dimension, to produce a novel, fully automated, two-dimensional high-performance liquid chromatography technique. The method was shown to have performance advantages over one-dimensional reversed-phase chromatography for peptide separations.