Reproducibility of Two-Dimensional Gel Electrophoresis at Different Replication Levels

Reliability of two-dimensional electrophoresis differential display experiments depends on the reproducibility of the separations. The contribution of biological and technical variation to the overall variance of the two-dimensional patterns was estimated based on the factors found to influence spot volume variance. The second dimension and the staining were responsible for most of the spot volume variance, while using pooled samples lowered biological variation to the level of technical variation.