Isolation of Heat Shock Protein Complexes

Heat shock proteins (Hsp) are molecular chaperones with the capability to interact with a wide range of other proteins and are thus often found coupled with other heat shock and non-heat shock proteins. This can be an advantage to study specific interactions between a chaperone and other proteins and to generate an antitumoral immune response. In this chapter, we present two protocols to isolate Hsp. One involves column chromatography with hydroxyapatite and the other employs immunoprecipitation with antibodies coupled to magnetic beads. In both cases, we specifically want to isolate Hsp coupled with other proteins and use the Hsp complexes as intermediaries to present the coupled peptides/proteins to the immune system, or to explore the associations of a particular Hsp with other proteins.