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BlueLine - Tower System

The SERVA HPE™ Tower is a multiple flatbed polyacrylamide electrophoresis gel system for 1 and 2-dimensional separations, providing second to none resolution, reproducibility and sensitivity – the first true High Performance Electrophoresis system.

The HPE™ FlatTop Tower consists of four horizontal electrophoresis chambers, which are built as movable drawers into a metal housing. The precast HPE™ gels, which are less than 1 mm thin and filmbacked, are protected from light during the run. No glass plates are used. The gels are placed on aluminum oxide ceramics cooling plates, which ensures very efficient heat dissipation and therefore straight electrophoretic migration in each gel. The HPE™ tower also has an inbuilt pump for optimum cooling water flow through the plates. The system does not need buffer chambers; instead fibre wicks are soaked with concentrated electrophoresis buffers and placed between the gel edges and the electrode wires, which are mounted into the lids. The electrode positions are adjustable to the two different gel sizes. A sophisticated electronic sensor system delivers information about the electric field distribution between the HPE™ gels, and indicates which drawer chambers are in use. The HPE™ tower is run with an external power supply (cat. no. HPE-PSP) and a thermostatic circulator.

The breakthrough technology of HPE means:

• HPE™ gels are 650 μm thick - optimized for efficient cooling and staining, without showing overloading effects for highly abundant proteins. To ensure complete transfer of proteins from the first into the second dimension gel, the composition of the polyacrylamide matrix of the 2D HPE™ gels is modified and allows the application of the IPG strip in a sample trench.
• Efficient temperature control in the HPE™ tower and precise production of HPE™ gel polymerisation guarantees highly reliable gels and reproducible results.
• Shelf-life of the HPE™ gels is one year, and they remain stable during the storage period. A buffer system based on Tris-tricine-SDS - storage pH value of the gel buffer is 6.9 - is preventing alkaline hydrolysis. During electrophoresis the pH value in the gel raises to pH 8.5 for fast migration of the zones. The tricine in the buffer allows separation reaching below 6 kDa in HPE™ gels, unlike the 10 kDa in standard Laemmli gels.
• The buffers are ready to use. The equilibration buffer is provided with the HPE™ gels - therefore less variables than conventional electrophoresis and quick to use.

• All state-of-the art fluorescent detection (including DIGE) can be applied using HPE gels polymerised on non-fluorescent film-backing (NF). The HPE™ tower protects gels from light during the run.
• Short set-up and fast running time - up to 8 gels can be run per day..
• 2D HPE™ gel shows markedly more protein spots than conventional 2D gel (20 - 50 % depending on sample type).
• No large buffer volumes – no time wasted cleaning glass plates and buffer chambers
• An environmentally friendly process - no need to handle acrylamide monomer and no contaminated fluid waste to dispose of.
• Film-backed gels do not swell or shrink during staining. Automated spot picking is easier from a film-backed HPE™ gel than from conventional slab gels or gels on glass plates. Fluorescent stained gels can be post-stained with visible dyes for manual spot picking.
• The effectiveness of mass spec and analysis is increased. The higher protein concentration in the spots of an HPE™ gel also improves the yield of tryptic digested peptides because of the higher protein-to polyacrylamide gel ratio.