Clinic for Ear- Nose- and Throat Disease, Head and Neck surgery, Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany.
Eur Arch Otorhinolaryngol. 2009 Nov;266(11):1699-702. doi: 10.1007/s00405-009-0960-5. Epub 2009 Apr 4.
Cerumen is a waxy substance with a mixture of different lipids and and not yet identified proteins. Analysing ear wax can be quite laborious because of the different and sometimes interfering components. Therefore, time-consuming techniques such as chromatography or spectrometry were used to gain informations about the components of ear wax. Conclusions were drawn from immunohistochemical detections of special proteins within the skin or the glands of the external ear canal about the existence of these proteins within the ear wax. But directly analysing the proteins within the ear wax was difficult. We, therefore, worked out a method to isolate proteins from ear wax. Ear wax was collected from 16 adults with no infections of the external ear canal. The protein isolation was conducted using the Qproteome Mammalian Protein Prep Kit by Qiagen in two different kind of ways (cell and lysat fraction). Afterwards, we performed a quantification of the total protein concentration using the BCA method. There was a statistical significant difference in the total protein concentration between the two different (cell and lysat fraction) described ways. Furthermore, it is a fast and easy method to extract proteins from ear wax. The benefit of the described method and the field of application will be discussed.
耳垢是一种混合了不同脂质和尚未确定的蛋白质的蜡状物质。由于不同的成分有时会相互干扰，因此分析耳垢会非常费力。因此，人们使用了费时的技术，如色谱法或光谱法，来获取耳垢成分的信息。通过对皮肤或外耳道口腺体中的特殊蛋白质进行免疫组织化学检测，可以得出关于这些蛋白质在耳垢中存在的结论。但是，直接分析耳垢中的蛋白质是困难的。因此，我们制定了一种从耳垢中分离蛋白质的方法。我们从 16 名没有外耳感染的成年人中收集了耳垢。使用 Qiagen 的 Qproteome 哺乳动物蛋白制备试剂盒，我们采用了两种不同的方法（细胞和裂解物）来分离蛋白质。之后，我们使用 BCA 法对总蛋白浓度进行了定量。两种不同方法（细胞和裂解物）之间的总蛋白浓度存在统计学上的显著差异。此外，这种从耳垢中提取蛋白质的方法快速且简单。我们将讨论所描述方法的优点和应用领域。
