Thank you.

My first question is if it’s expected that some preservative could’ve maintained the observed electrophoresis pattern. Apparently salts weren’t found, but what about some liquid substance like ethanol?

My second question is about Linoli’s reported fractionation patterns. I have absolutely no background in pathology or in biochemistry more generally. However, my extreme layman’s understanding is that the percentages of the various blood serum proteins are found from the graph by choosing the x coordinates of adjacent local minima of the curve, then taking the area under the curve lying above that interval (and then dividing by the total area under the curve).

With your medical background, would you happen to know if this computation procedure is correct? Because if so, I find it difficult to understand how Linoli applied it to the graph in his paper to get the percentages he reports. Compared to ordinary SPEP graphs I can find on the internet[1], the peaks/troughs except for the one very large spike at the end seem extremely difficult to visually resolve in order find which intervals you should integrate over for which proteins.

Furthermore, I’ve crudely sampled 75 points from the curve in Linoli’s paper by hand, and linearly interpolated them in the graphing calculator website Desmos here[2] in order to reproduce his curve in a way that I could play with. You’ll see there are sliders for endpoints I call « a » and « b » that you can use to find the area under the curve of arbitrary regions, and it then computes the fraction in comparison to the total area. (I’ve rescaled the x-coordinates of the data so that they range from 0 to 1, but this rescaling shouldn’t affect the percentage area under the curve of corresponding regions.) Using this tool, I find it difficult to see the obvious endpoints that would reproduce protein fractions like those Linoli reports.

That said, with my total lack of training, I have no clue what I’m talking about and wondered if you had any insight that could clarify the methodology here.

[1] Example: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Results-of-serum-protein-electrophoresis-SPEP-are-portrayed-above-A-Normal-SPEP-with_fig3_379759708

[2] https://www.desmos.com/calculator/an1p3ot5c1

We do.