Gastric mucins play a major role in the protection of the gastrointestinal tract. The samples of gastric mucins of different origin obtained by an extraction of gastric mucosa with Tris-HCl buffer were separated using size exclusion chromatography on Sephadex G-100.
While samples of rat gastric mucins are characterized by the presence of only high-molecular weight fraction of glycoproteins, fragmented mucin components in non-denaturated samples were observed in canine and human gastric mucins. Differences in the fragmentation pattern were observed in patients with ulcer diseases and gastric cancer.