Abstract
ON theoretical grounds it is generally believed that most structural genes have common isoelectrophoretic alleles1–3—polymorphic alleles that cannot be discovered by electrophoresis—but there is no direct evidence for this. Methods that might be used to search for such structural variability (involving, for example, thermostability or kinetic studies) have not often been adopted as screening procedures though they have been used to compare already identified electrophoretic alleles. This is not only because such methods are often unsuitable for screening purposes. Even when a screening method can be applied, its efficiency in revealing existing structural variability is not known a priori, not even approximately, as for electrophoresis. Moreover, this unknown efficiency is presumably very low because although electrophoresis, being a separation technique, separates the products of two alleles in heterozygotes, other screening procedures only pick up the combined products which may or may not show an intermediate characteristic. It would usually be extremely difficult to distinguish between the three types. Thus, for any enzyme for which such a method is available, a two-step procedure seems convenient: (a) to test it on already known structural (electrophoretic) alleles of that enzyme, and if it turns out that it is efficient (b) to use the method in a search for structural isoelectrophoretic alleles. It must be assumed that these two types of structural differences are, on average, equally likely to affect the parameter being studied.
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TRIPPA, G., LOVERRE, A. & CATAMO, A. Thermostability studies for investigating non-electrophoretic polymorphic alleles in Drosophila melanogaster. Nature 260, 42–44 (1976). https://doi.org/10.1038/260042a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/260042a0
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