Microchemical instrumentation.

A number of cell surface molecules of great theoretical and practical importance simply cannot be obtained in amounts sufficient for molecular analysis using conventional methods and instrumentation. Because of our interest in such studies, we began about eight years ago to explore the possibility of developing new instrumentation for the sequence analysis of very small quantities of polypeptide chains. These efforts have led to the development of two microsequenators which employ one thousandth to one ten-thousandth the material used in the original sequenator described by Per Edman. In addition, in conjunction with the explosion of recombinant DNA techniques, we also have begun to develop instrumentation for the sequence analysis and synthesis of DNA molecules. In this paper we describe briefly several new instruments that have been developed at Caltech. We believe this new instrumentation in conjunction with the recombinant DNA and hybridoma technologies will provide unique opportunities to analyze cell-surface molecule in the years ahead.