Migration Behaviour of Discontinuous Buffers in Capillary Electrophoresis during Protein Enrichment
Abstract
To enrich protein at sub-microliter sample volumes, our group has developed a discontinuous buffer system which consists of an acid and a base inside a capillary. Upon voltage application, the protein moves towards and stacks at the pH junction. Prior to this work, we only focused on the protein enrichment and have not investigated the migration behaviour of various ions in this system. However, it is important to understand the mechanism of the migration of these ions, because the pH junction formation and further the protein enrichment are based on it. In this work, the ion migration patterns at the pH junction have been investigated by both experiments and computer simulation. The discovery of the mobility of the pH junction controlled by buffer composition allows us to remove unwanted background molecule from the enriched protein sample.