Fig 1: CD39 and CD73 leading to elevated levels of extracellular adenosine.
Extracellular adenosine 5′-triphosphate (ATP) is released by dying and damaged cells, and it acts on many immune cells to promote inflammation. On the other hand, the unphosphorylated
metabolite, adenosine, functions as an anti-inflammatory molecule. Two extracellular ecto-5´-Nucleotidases, CD39, and CD73, convert extracellular ATP to ADP/AMP and AMP to adenosine, respectively, leading to elevated levels of extracellular adenosine (Fig 1).
Gel filtration (GF), also referred as Size Exclusion Chromatography (SEC), plays a key role in the high quality purification of enzymes, polysaccharides, nucleic acids, proteins and other biological macromolecules. Gel filtration is the simplest and mildest of all chromatography techniques to separate biomolecules on the basis of difference in size. Nevertheless, the list of available columns is quite awesome and the characteristics of each of them are very different. Also, each characteristic highly influences the quality of the final purified product with important consequences in downstream applications.
