ABSTRACT
As a graduate student in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Guelph, a 15,000 student university about an hour's drive outside of Toronto, I was familiarized with electrophoretic separation by the demands of a research project that required hundreds, perhaps thousands, of acrylamide slab gels to be run over the course of 4 years. This, of course, was in pursuit of my doctorate, which relied on the successful search for an illusive photoaffinitylabeled protein that we felt would help unravel the mysteries of gene expression. What became crystal clear from running, staining, and analyzing those innumerable gels was the revelation that electrophoretic separation was, indeed, the workhorse of the modern biochemical sciences. Perhaps more apocalyptic was the realization (brought about by a recurrent experimental schedule that required I go to the lab at 2 a.m. to shut off a gel) that there had to be a better way to do electrophoretic analysis! ! ! Little did I know that, roughly half a decade earlier, the Jorgenson and Everaerts groups had laid the groundwork for that apocalypse to be fulfilled.
