Cereal Chem 72:312-316  |  VIEW ARTICLE

Rapid Differentiation of Oat Cultivars and of Rice Cultivars by Capillary Zone Electrophoresis.

G. L. Lookhart and S. R. Bean. Copyright 1995 by the American Association of Cereal Chemists, Inc. 

Capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) of endosperm storage proteins was used to differentiate cultivars of both oats and rice in less than 12 min. This is the first report that proteins of these two cereals have been separated by CZE. Cultivars were chosen for the difficulty of differentiating them by other means, electrophoretic or chromatographic. Ethanol (70%) extracts of the oat samples were separated on a 20- micrometer i.d. untreated fused-silica capillary, whereas rice samples were extracted with 60% 1-propanol, and the solubilized proteins were separated on a 50-micrometer i.d. untreated fused-silica capillary. The CZE separation buffer was 0.1M phosphate, pH 2.5, containing 0.05% hydroxypropylmethylcellulose (HPMC). Most cultivars were differentiated quickly and easily. Only the patterns of two rice cultivars, IR36 and IR50, were nearly identical. There were no differences between IR36 and IR50 extracts by high- performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) or acid (A)-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE). CZE is a faster method of separating endosperm storage proteins than A-PAGE and separates as least as well and better in most cases than either A-PAGE or reversed phase (RP)-HPLC.