A two-dimensional electrophoresis database of rat heart proteins.

More than 3000 myocardial protein species of Wistar Kyoto rat, an important animal model, were separated by high-resolution two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DE) and characterized in terms of isoelectric point (pI) and molecular mass (Mr). Currently, the 2-DE database contains 64 identified proteins; forty-three were identified by peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) using matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (MALDI-MS), nine by exclusive comparison with other 2-DE heart protein databases, and in only 12 cases of 60 attempts N-terminal sequencing was successful. We used the Make2ddb software package downloaded from the ExPASy server for the construction of a rat myocardial 2-DE database. The Make2ddb package simplifies the creation of a new 2-DE database if the Melanie II software and a Sun workstation under Solaris are available. Our 2-DE database of rat heart proteins can be accessed at URL http://gelmatching.inf.fu-berlin.de/pleiss/2d.