Proteoglycans of the intervertebral disc. Absence of degradation during the isolation of proteoglycans from the intervertebral disc.

Proteoglycans extracted with 4M-guanidinium chloride from pig intervetebral discs, and purified by equilibrium density-gradient centrifugation in CsCl, were of smaller hydrodynamic size than those extracted and purified in the same way from the laryngeal cartilage of the same animal. Whether this difference in size arose from degradation during the extraction and purification of the proteoglycans of the disc was investigated. Purified proteoglycans labelled either in the chondroitin sulphate chains or in the core protein were obtained from laryngeal cartilage by short-term organ culture. These labelled proteoglycans were added at the beginning of the extraction of the disc proteoglycans, and labelled cartilage and unlabelled disc proteoglycans were isolated and purified together. There was no appreciable loss of radioactivity after density-gradient centrifugation nor decrease in hydrodynamic size of the labelled cartilage proteoglycans on chromatography on Sepharose 2B, when these were present during the extraction of disc proteoglycans. It is concluded that disc proteoglycans are intrinsically of smaller size than cartilage proteoglycans and this difference in size does not arise from degradation during the extraction.