Studies on heterogeneity in ferritin subunits.

Subunits prepared by dissociating rat and human ferritins by acid/urea or SDS can be resolved by isoelectric focusing in urea/Triton gels into many discrete forms. Most of these are not true isosubunits but aggregation artefacts formed during electrofocusing. The distribution of H and L subunit classes in these aggregates indicates that HeLa and heart ferritins contain similar classes of H and L subunits but that one or both of these classes is different in liver and kidney ferritins. To avoid aggregation artefacts, we examined subunits synthesised in vitro from exogenous mRNA. Our results indicate that HeLa and rat liver cells synthesise only one class of L subunit but two classes of H subunit.