Application of immobilized metal affinity chromatography in proteomics.

It has been proved that the progress of proteomics is mostly determined by the development of advanced and sensitive protein separation technologies. Immobilized metal affinity chromatography (IMAC) is a powerful protein fractionation method used to enrich metal-associated proteins and peptides. In proteomics, IMAC has been widely employed as a prefractionation method to increase the resolution in protein separation. The combination of IMAC with other protein analytical technologies has been successfully utilized to characterize metalloproteome and post-translational modifications. In the near future, newly developed IMAC integrated with other proteomic methods will greatly contribute to the revolution of expression, cell-mapping and structural proteomics.