EN
The aim of this study was to show the usefulness of a commercial agarose gel electrophoresis (AGE) kit (QuickGel SP) for separating bovine serum protein fractions in comparison with conventional cellulose acetate electrophoresis (CAE). Serum protein bands were verified using five reference reagents corresponding to albumin and α₁₋, β₁₋, β₂₋, and γ-globulins. AGE clearly revealed six separated fractions of albumin and α₁₋, α₂₋, β₁₋, β₂₋, and γ-globulin fractions in 100% and 77.8% in serum samples of dairy cows from the healthy (n=27) and diseased groups (n=27), respectively. The α₁₋ and α₂₋globulins were not separated by CAE in 14.8% and 96.3% of the samples from the healthy and diseased groups, respectively, whereas β₂₋ and γ-globulin were not separated by CAE in 96.3% and 100% of the samples from the healthy and diseased groups, respectively. More than 94% of the points for the α-globulin fractions (α₁₋ and α₂₋globulins), the β-γ-globulin fractions (β₁₋, β₂₋, and γ-globulins), and the albumin/globulin ratio between AGE and CAE were within agreement on the Bland-Altman plots. However, the mean biases were not near zero in the albumin and β-γ-globulin fractions. These results suggest that the high-resolution commercial AGE kit can be utilized to separate bovine serum protein fractions.