Zincon as resonance Raman probe for quantitative evaluation of proteins

This paper demonstrates the potential of using a resonance Raman (RR) based method for the quantitative evaluation of protein concentrations. This method was applied to determine the concentration of bovine serum albumin (BSA) protein using zincon. In the protein–zincon liquid mixture, the number of unbound zincon molecules decreased markedly as the protein concentration increased because of the high affinity of zincon for proteins. We successfully detected very low concentrations of BSA (∼1 ng/ml) using this method, which demonstrates its great potential for the detection of proteins over a much wider range of concentrations in proteomic studies. This new RR-based method allows the detection of proteins in lower concentration than with the UV–vis-based and other protein assays commonly used in biochemical laboratories. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.