Micellar capillary electrophoresis separation and thermo-optical absorbance detection of products from manual peptide sequencing.

Micellar capillary electrophoresis is optimized for separation of phenylthiohydantoin (PTH) amino acids produced in manual Edman degradation reaction for protein sequencing. There are also two major side-products produced by the Edman degradation reaction: diphenylthiourea and dimethylphenylthiourea. We report the complete separation of 19 PTH amino acids plus the two major side-reaction products in 10 min. Capillary electrophoresis is used to identify the five residues generated by manual Edman degradation sequencing of a pentapeptide.