Research Project Blog Post Individual Blog Post #1 By Brian Tran

In our group research project, we will be studying the relationship between salmon, chicken, sheep, cow, pig and deer using protein gel electrophoresis.

           Protein gel electrophoresis, also known as SDS-PAGE, is a common technique used to study proteins in the muscle of different animals. It differs from agarose gel because DNA is much bigger than protein. SDS-PAGE also runs vertically instead of horizontally like agarose gel. One of the reasons for this is because oxygen can hurt the acrylamide in sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. When the gel is vertical, it can’t be exposed to oxygen as easily.

            The out group in this study is salmon. Chickens, cows, pigs and sheep can be commonly found in farms across the U.S. and their meat is just as commonly found in grocery stores. Deer can also be found in farms but less than the other animals probably because they take longer to grow to a size that can be farmed for more meat than other livestock animals. In fact, this may be a reason that cows, pigs and sheep protein could be more related than deer and chicken. Farmers raise these meat animals with better nutrition, genetic selection and more advanced techniques to estimate an animal’s body composition (Mitchell, 2007). It would make sense that the cow, pig and sheep meat sold in the stores that come from modern farms share more similarities than chicken, deer and salmon.

References:

Mitchell AD. 2007. Impact of research with cattle, pigs, and sheep on nutritional concepts: body 

            composition and growth. J Nutr 137:711–714.

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