Phos-tag World: The path to the future of electrophoresis, pioneered by the Phos-tag

Abstract

Phosphorylation is the most important protein post-translational modification, and affects almost all cellular processes. Phos-tag is a functional molecule that binds specifically phosphorylated ions. Technologies using Phos-tag are powerful tools for phosphoproteomics. Tip column chromatography using Phos-tag agarose is a superior method for the enrichment of phosphorylated peptides for mass spectrometric analysis. Phos-tag SDS-PAGE using Phos-tag acrylamide allows the specific separation of phosphorylated proteins by inducing an electrophoretic mobility shift. Using Phos-tag SDS-PAGE, we can obtain significant and abundant information about multiple phosphorylated forms of individual proteins. At present, however, the protocol for Phos-tag SDS-PAGE is not capable of analyzing multiple proteins. We expect to overcome this hurdle through further development of the technology. We believe that Phos-tag SDS-PAGE has enormous potential for accelerating the progress of proteomics research using electrophoresis.