It has been found (1) that suspensions of elementary bodies of vaccinia studied by electrophoresis in the Tiselins apparatus yield moving boundaries which differ from those usually observed. Unlike solutions of ordinary proteins or of two of the plant virus proteins (tobacco mosaic (2) and bushy stunt (3)) which on electrolysis display boundaries that remain quite sharp and fiat, suspensions of the elementary bodies of vaccinia show distortions in the form of a stream of the particles moving ahead from the center of the boundaries in the direction of the electric current. Thus, one observes a stream of the suspended material rising in the center of one leg of the cell and a corresponding stream of the solvent descending in the center of the other leg. Reversal of the current results in the reversal of these effects. Because of the asymmetric nature of this boundary disturbance, simple convection arising from the electrical heat generated cannot account for the phenomenon. McFarlane (1) attributed the effect to endosmosis.It will be shown by data presented in this paper that the type of boundaries observed with vaccine virus can be obtained also with particles of a similar size but of an entirely different nature. Furthermore, the mobility of such boundaries in a given medium depends principally on the nature of the surface of the particles, a fact which has long been known to workers using the microscopic electrophoretic method in which the motion of a single particle is studied (4). In addition, the boundary distortions obtained with suspensions of particles will be shown to be artifacts in that they do not result from any characteristic property of the particles themselves but rather from the absence of density gradients of sufficient magnitude at the boundary.
Materials and MethodsElementary Bodies of Vaccinia.--Elementary bodies of vaccinia were prepared according to the method of Craigie (5) which has recently been redescribed at length (6). 40 ce. of a stock suspension of virus obtained from one rabbit contained about 8 rag. of dry material (7); thus, the concentration was approximately 0.2 mg. per cc. or 0.2 per