Extraction of total proteins from tissue has generally been limited by the poor solubility of many proteins in traditional extraction buffers. This has been especially true for lipid-rich samples such as adipose tissue, but also for many other types of samples. Traditional detergent-based sample preparation methods may not adequately dissociate all proteins, especially hydrophobic proteins, which may be tightly associated with membrane lipids. Isolation of these proteins is often very inefficient, because the bulk of membrane proteins are often discarded in the insoluble fraction after extraction. As a result, proteomic analysis of tissues is often biased toward the more soluble proteins. We have previously described a method for efficient extraction of proteins from samples of a variety of mammalian tissues, using pressure cycling technology (PCT) and the novel chemistry of

Pressure BioSciences’ ProteoSolve-SB kit. Here we show that by using the new PCT MicroTubes, the ProteoSolve-SB protocol may be scaled down for use with tissue samples in the 10-20 mg size range. This scaled-down method is compatible with biopsy-size tissue samples.