Hi Rike, please specify your experiment. What do you mean with immunogenic treatment? Maybe ppi analysis with Co IP (Pulldown) ? What kind of LC-MS analysis will you perform "shotgun" with peptides or "topdown" with undigested proteins?

If you intend to run peptides in LC-MS i would recommend to store the peptides on STAGE-tips (Rappsilber et al. 2003), this could also be the best way for the transport to Japan, and elute the peptides immediately before MS analysis.

Best, Murat

Rike, in case you are already using SDS-PAGE and CBB to stain interesting bands, you will still have to do the tryptic digestion and peptide extraction under professional conditions. If you are not set up to work under low keratin conditions (i.e. low-dust, which includes not only the hood for cutting the slices but also the gel equipment) I would recommend you ask if your collaborators in Japan can do that part. Then my best guess for a "transport safe" would indeed be to send the gel slices in closed Eppendorfs with a little water, and ship these coooled if possible. In this way the proteins are usually stabilzized on the timerange of weeks, but they must not dry up.

One more note of caution - selecting the bands based on CBB staining alone is not a good idea if your detection is by MS as the modern MS techniques are order of magnitude more sensitive than CBB, so interesting proteins might be in regions of the gel that do not appear to be stained. We routinely cut the whole lane into 8-24 equidistant slices and rather analyze the whole by nanoLC/MS/MS. Results can be surprisingly detailed! Good luck, Christof

Thank you very much for your suggestion and information, ok I will prepare protein samples to be subjected to LC-MS/MS analyses as much as possible, and should carry out experiments (in-gel digestion with tripsin) in japan.