Separation of olive proteins by capillary gel electrophoresis.

Olive proteins are not well known and there are still a lot of unknown information requiring further studies focused on the determination and characterization of these proteins. Despite the widely use of gel electrophoresis, this is the first time that capillary gel electrophoresis (CGE) is applied to separate proteins extracted from olive fruits. Seven common peaks were identified in the twenty olive varieties studied in this work. According to their migration times, these seven peaks could correspond to molecules with molecular masses of 11.0±0.4, 13.9±0.5, 16.3±0.8, 22.1±0.6, 30±1, 48±1, and 53±2 kDa. All of the determined molecular masses could be attributed to proteins and four of them have been previously observed by SDS-PAGE. The electrophoretic profiles were also evaluated for their capability to differentiate olive varieties according to their presumed geographical origin. Results demonstrated that this method could successfully classify the studied olive varieties by its combination with multivariate chemometrics tools.