Substituting Coomassie Brilliant Blue for bromophenol blue in two-dimensional electrophoresis buffers improves the resolution of focusing patterns.

In a new area of postgenomics challenges, the optimization of protein identification has become a central goal in microbiochemistry. In this work, we demonstrate that the substitution of Coomassie Brilliant Blue for bromophenol blue in two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE) buffers improves the focusing of whole proteins from Pseudomonas aeruginosa. This improvement of focusing concerns more particularly basic proteins. This enhancement may be attributed to a better transfer from the first to the second dimension, which probably highlights an increase in the solubility of proteins in the IPG strips. Hence, the use of an efficient tracking dye in the 2-DE buffers may enlarge protein recovery on proteome maps.