High resolution of honey bee (Apis mellifera) venom peptides by propionic acid/urea polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis after ethanol precipitation.

A new and simple gel electrophoretic method is described which enables the protein and polypeptide components of bee venom to be resolved on a single gel. The electrophoretic method allows octapeptides to be resolved and species as small as decapeptides can be detected at high sensitivity using the Coomassie blue staining method without prior fixation. This has been achieved by replacing acetic acid by propionic acid in acid/urea polyacrylamide gels and by controlling the amount of TEMED catalyst for the polymerisation of high concentration gels in order to obtain a low effective pore size. We demonstrated the value of ethanol precipitation as a rapid and efficient desalting the fractionation technique and propose that it could be used in combination with gel filtration to purify many of the peptides to homogeneity.