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MEETING NEWS of a cell’s contents rather than a few components. A cell is drawn into a capillary and lysed, and the liberated proteins are fluorescently labeled, separated using CE, and detected with laser-induced fluorescence. Researchers using this method have already reported a resolution of ~30 components from individual cultured human cancer cells (Anal. Chem. 2000, 72, 872–877). They also have noted significant variations in the protein levels from cell to cell—even for proteins that are expressed at high levels—which they attribute, in part, to cells being in different stages of the cell cycle at the time of analysis. In more recent work on the embryogenesis of Caenorhabditis elegans, the researchers have detected differential
protein expression in the AB and P1 cells, which are the products of the very first division of the fertilized P0 cell. CE-based single cell studies using laser-induced native fluorescence detection are being performed by Sheri J. Lillard at the University of California– Riverside and colleagues. Using a system that Lillard worked with while in Edward Yeung’s lab at Ames Laboratory–USDOE and Iowa State University, her group is now pushing for higher throughput. For the analysis of hemoglobin and carbonic anhydrase, they have achieved an average run time of
