Notes & Tips

Cell Disruption ofEscherichia coliby Glass Bead Stirring for the Recovery of Recombinant Proteins

Thyreostatic drugs, illegally administrated to livestock for fattening purposes, are banned in the European Union since 1981 (Council Directive 81/602/EC). For monitoring their illegal use, sensitive and specific analytical methods are required. In this study an UHPLC-MS/MS method was described for quantitative analysis of eight thyreostatic drugs in urine, this without a derivatisation step. The sample pretreatment involved a reduction step with dithiothreitol under denaturating conditions at 65 °C, followed by liquid-liquid extraction with ethyl acetate. This analytical procedure was subsequently validated according to the EU criteria (2002/657/EC Decision), resulting in decision limits and detection capabilities ranging between 1.1 and 5.5 μg L⁻¹ and 1.7 and 7.5 μg L⁻¹, respectively. The method obtained for all, xenobiotic thyreostats, a precision (relative standard deviation) lower than 15.5%, and the linearity ranged between 0.982 and 0.999. The performance characteristics fulfill not only the requirements of the EU regarding the provisional minimum required performance limit (100 μg L⁻¹), but also the recommended concentration fixed at 10 μg L⁻¹ in urine set by the Community of Reference Laboratories. Future experiments applying this method should provide the answer to the alleged endogenous status of thiouracil.

The human tumor suppressor protein p53 is understood only to some extent on a structural level. We performed a comprehensive biochemical and biophysical structure–function analysis of p53 full-length protein and p53 fragments. The analysis showed that p53 and the fragments investigated form stable functional units. Full-length p53 and the tetrameric fragment N93p53 (residues 93–393) are, however, destabilized significantly compared to the monomeric core domain (residues 94–312) and the monomeric fragment p53C312 (residues 1–312). At the physiological temperature of 37 °C and in the absence of modifications or stabilizing partners, wild-type p53 is more than 50% unfolded correlating with a 75% loss in DNA-binding activity. Furthermore the analysis of CD spectra revealed that full-length p53 contains large unstructured regions in its N and C-terminal parts. Our results indicate that full-length p53 is a modular protein consisting of defined structured and unstructured regions. We propose that p53 belongs to the growing family of loosely folded or partially unstructured native proteins. The lack of a rigid structure combined with the low overall stability may allow the physiological interaction of p53 with a multitude of partner proteins and the regulation of its turnover.