2024 - Department of Pharmacy

Electromembrane extraction (EME) of human chorionic gonadotropin – our first protein attempt

Published Jan. 22, 2025 7:39 AM

For long time, we have been working with EME of peptides. In a recent project, we tested for the first time EME of a protein. We selected hCG as model protein, and used extraction conditions previously optimized for peptides. We were unable to extract the intact protein, but extraction of signature peptide after tryptic digestion of the protein was feasible. We will definitely do more experiments with proteins, based on what we have learned from the current project…

Published Jan. 21, 2025 10:50 AM

Peptides are small pieces of protein, and they play a vital role in biology. For this reason, we have been studying EME of peptides for a while. This work has been done with a small selection of model peptides. To give this research a more general anchor, we recently studied EME of 6,000 peptides in collaboration with scientists from Technical University of Munich. From this very fundamental and complex study, we learned that extraction efficiency is related to peptide polarity and charge, and that a surprisingly high number of peptides can be extracted by EME.

Published Mar. 5, 2024 12:30 PM

Looking back into research papers on electromembrane extraction (EME), a jungle of different liquid membranes has been used, and they have been developed more or less by trial-and-error type of experiments. The last year, we have put a lot of efforts into standardizing stable and efficient liquid membranes, to propose generic extraction conditions to bases and acids of different polarity. A recent paper is one contribution in a series of papers, where we have optimized generic conditions for basic substances with low and moderate polarity

EME of peptides

Published Mar. 5, 2024 12:28 PM

We have for long time been investigating electromembrane extraction (EME) of peptides, in a large research project funded by the Research Council of Norway. Peptides are difficult because they have very poor partition into the liquid membrane. However, by testing a large number of liquid membrane compositions, we have learned that deep eutectic solvents show great potential. The deep eutectic solvents we prepare by mixing two solid substances together, and with a magical touch, we have a liquid that works superbly for peptide extraction!