About the author

Nick Oswald

Nick is a molecular biologist-turned-publisher. After a PhD in Developmental Biology and an eclectic seven years in biotech he is now Editorial Manager of Neuroendocrinology and the founder and Editor-In-Chief of Bitesize Bio. You are welcome to connect with Nick on LinkedIn

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For routine procedures involving cell lysis, it’s good for the lysis to be… routine. Of course there are many good and freely available lysis buffer recipes but for convenience and reproducibility you can’t beat pre-made lysis buffers.

Focusing on lysis for protein extraction, here are some of the reagents available for fast and efficient lysis of some of the most common cell types you might be using.

Reagent for E.coli lysis: Bugbuster from Novagen

Bugbuster gently breaks open E.coli cells in 20 minutes at room temperature. The lysis procedure can be enhanced by the addition of benzonase (a nuclease) and lysozyme. But I generally find that these are not required if you stick to the recommended ratio of 5ml bugbuster/1g (wet cell weight) of E.coli. Note that standard bugbuster contains primary amines, but an alternative formulation without primary amines is available.

Reagent for extremely lazy E.coli lysis: Popculture from Novagen

Popculture is a detergent-based reagent that can be added directly to an E.coli culture to lyse the cells in the medium. It is mainly used to prepare crude extracts for affinity purification by can also be used for some screening applications.

Reagent for yeast, gram positive and gram negative bacterial lysis: Y-PER from Pierce

Y-PER allows a fast and versatile lysis of yeast (and gram pos/neg bacteria). The standard  protocol takes 20 minutes to produce a crude lysate that can be used for purification, screening and many other applications. Additional protocols are available that allow the reagent to be used for applications like RNA and genomic DNA extraction.

Reagent for plant cell lysis: CelLytic P from Sigma-Aldrich

CelLytic P enables extraction of proteins from fresh or frozen leaves. It has been demonstrated on tobacco, tomato, spinach, and Arabidopsis but is not limited to these. The reagent is based on a non-ionic detergent and does not denature proteins. It also contains bicine buffer, which is preferable for many biological activities.

Reagent for insect cell lysis: I-PER from Pierce

I-PER uses a non-ionic detergent formulation to lyse adherent or suspension insect cells. The extracted protein can be used for Western blotting, assays, his-purification or ion-exhange chromatography.

Reagent for Mammalian cell lysis: ProteoJET from Fermentas

Proteoject uses mild detergents for a fast and simple extraction of native, non-denatured proteins from mammalian cultured cells or tissue samples. The procedure is carried out at room temperature  and can be performed on adherent cells while they are still attached to the plate – so no scraping!  The isolated proteins can be used directly in many applications, including immunoprecipitation, affinity purification, reporter gene assays and electrophoretic mobility shift assays (EMSA) and  Bradford assays.

Photo: Prozac74