Determination of protein oligomerization state: two approaches based on glutaraldehyde crosslinking.

Many biochemical and biophysical methods can be used to characterize the oligomerization state of proteins. One of the most widely used is glutaraldehyde crosslinking, mainly because of the minimum equipment and reagents required. However, the crosslinking procedures currently in use are impaired by the low specificity of the reagent, which can chemically bond any two amino groups that are close in space. Thus, extensive and time-consuming investigation of the reaction conditions is usually required. Here we describe two approaches based on glutaraldehyde that readily give reliable results.