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Meet The Inventor: NuPAGE® System

1,650 views · Published 6 February 2012 · 3:47 · Indexed 3 October 2026

Channel: Thermo Fisher Scientific · 2012 · Science & Technology

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Learn more about the NuPAGE® system @ http://www.lifetechnologies.com/nupage

Interview with Tim Updyke, Senior Scientist at Life Technologies who invented the NuPAGE® system.
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I'm Tim Updyke, and I'm a Senior Staff Scientist at Life Technologies. 

Why did you develop the NuPAGE® system?

So, the reasons we developed the NuPAGE® system were based on customer needs, and they had three major needs:
1. They wanted to have pre-cast gels with a nice stable shelf life;
2. The other, they knew that the existing Tris-glycine chemistry was causing some modifications to their proteins during the separation of the gel;
3. They really wanted to get their separation results much faster

We developed the NuPAGE® gel system to address these three customer needs by not only developing a long shelf life gel chemistry, but a chemistry that would allow the gels to run at a neutral pH, unlike existing gel technologies that run at very high pH's. 

Is the NuPAGE® system just a gel or more than a gel?

So the NuPAGE® system is more than just a gel, it's the gels themselves plus running buffers. And here we have a concept where a single gel with two different running buffers can provide two completely different separation patterns. And the additional thing that we added was a sample buffer that helped to dramatically reduce the amount of modifications of proteins during the sample preparation period. That was a marked improvement over the classical [..] buffer. 

How does the NuPAGE® system preserve your sample?

The NuPAGE® system preserves your sample proteins in two ways; one it protects the proteins when they're actually being separated in the gel by having them be in an environment of neutral pH. The other is during sample preparation, we've developed a sample buffer that allow for complete denaturation and reduction without the need to boil your sample for 5 mins. People still feed they need to do that but with the NuPAGE® system there's no need to do that, you can use much lower temperatures than that, insures that your proteins remain intact.

Is there anything that compares to the NuPAGE® system?

Are there other products that compare to the NuPAGE®, the answer is really no. There's a lot of products over the years that have come out since NuPAGE® has been on the market that address some of the needs. They have a longer shelf life. But nearly all of them, actually all of them, have still very high operating pH's. So there's still some protein modification that takes place and many of them continue to use classical sample preparation methods that can lead to protein degradation.

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