(527d) Electroporation for Extraction of Intracellular Proteins and Genes

Extraction of intracellular proteins and genes from cells is often an important first step for conducting molecular biology and proteomics studies. Electroporation is a simple and effective approach for these applications. Being a physical method, electroporation eliminates the use of chemical and biological lysis agents which require removal and may interfere with subsequent analysis. We demonstrated that electroporation was capable of releasing intracellular proteins from adherent Chinese hamster ovary cells while preserving the cell viability. By tuning the duration and intensity of an electric pulse, we were able to control the average amount of protein release and the percentage of viable cells after the operation. Furthermore, we showed that electrical lysis offered high efficiency for DNA extraction from both eukaryotic cells and bacterial cells that was comparable to the widely-used chemical lysis.