Electrophoresis VOLUME

Source Adapted from Baker, D. R. Capillary Electrophoresis. Wiley-Interscience New York, 1995. "Concentration depends on the volume of sample injected. 

Biomolecule Separations. Advances in chemical separation techniques such as capillary zone electrophoresis (cze) and sedimentation field flow fractionation (sfff) allow for the isolation of nanogram quantities of amino acids and proteins, as weU as the characterization of large biomolecules (63—68) (see Biopolymers, analytical techniques). The two aforementioned techniques, as weU as chromatography and centrifugation, ate all based upon the differential migration of materials. Trends in the area of separations are toward the manipulation of smaller sample volumes, more rapid purification and analysis of materials, higher resolution of complex mixtures, milder conditions, and higher recovery (69). 

Capillary Electrophoresis. Capillary electrophoresis (ce) is an analytical technique that can achieve rapid high resolution separation of water-soluble components present in small sample volumes. The separations are generally based on the principle of electrically driven ions in solution. Selectivity can be varied by the alteration of pH, ionic strength, electrolyte composition, or by incorporation of additives. Typical examples of additives include organic solvents, surfactants (qv), and complexation agents (see Chelating agents). 

Capillary Electrophoresis. Capillaries were first appHed as a support medium for electrophoresis in the early 1980s (44,45). The glass capillaries used are typically 20 to 200 p.m in diameter (46), may be filled with buffer or gel, and are frequendy coated on the inside. Capillaries are used because of the high surface-to-volume ratio which allows high voltages without heating effects. The only limitations associated with capillaries are limits of detection and clearance of sample components. 

Limits of detection become a problem in capillary electrophoresis because the amounts of analyte that can be loaded into a capillary are extremely small. In a 20 p.m capillary, for example, there is 0.03 P-L/cm capillary length. This is 1/100 to 1/1000 of the volume typically loaded onto polyacrylamide or agarose gels. For trace analysis, a very small number of molecules may actually exist in the capillary after loading. To detect these small amounts of components, some on-line detectors have been developed which use conductivity, laser Doppler effects, or narrowly focused lasers (qv) to detect either absorbance or duorescence (47,48). The conductivity detector claims detection limits down to lO molecules. The laser absorbance detector has been used to measure some of the components in a single human cell (see Trace AND RESIDUE ANALYSIS). 

The final purification steps are responsible for the removal of the last traces of impurities. The volume reduction in the earlier stages of the separation train are necessarv to ensure that these high-resolution operations are not overloaded. Generally, chromatograjmy is used in these final stages. Electrophoresis can also be used, but since it is rarely found in process-scale operations, it is not addressed here. The final product preparation may require removal of solvent and drying, or lyophihzation, of the product. 

Yamamoto et al. also coupled gel permeation HPLC and CE in an on-line fashion in 1990, where capillary isotachophoresis was again used in the second dimension. This technique was also not comprehensive due to the loss of resolution between the techniques. It was also not particularly fast, with a 23 min CE cycle, which was repeated 90 times throughout the HPLC run (14). Volume incompatibility between HPLC and CE was one problem not addressed in this study, in which a large HPLC column was coupled to an electrophoresis capillary. 

Figure 9.10 Three-dimensional representation of the data volume of a tryptic digest of ovalbumin. Series of planar slices through the data volume produce stacks of disks in order to show peaks. Reprinted from Analytical Chemistry, 67, A. W. Moore Jr and J. W. Jorgenson, Comprehensive three-dimensional separation of peptides using size exclusion chromatogra-phy/reversed phase liquid chromatography/optically gated capillary zone electrophoresis, pp. 3456-3463, copyright 1995, with permission from the American Chemical Society.

Advances in experimental techniques, including pulsed-field gradient NMR, and theoretical methods, including volume averaging, macrotransport, and variational methods, that may lead to the resolution of a number of the fundamental issues in gel electrophoresis and to improvements in the practical application of electrotransport in polymeric media... 

It is interesting to note that Johansson andLofroth [183] found i to equal 1.09 for the diffusion analysis, but the partition coefficient followed a streched exponential with varying i from 1 to 2, indicating that the ratio of diffusion coefficient is not equal to the accessible volume fraction for large molecules, as is assumed in the ORMC model for gel electrophoresis. 

The volume averaging approach discussed in the section on diffusive transport can also be extended to account for electrophoresis [215] and hydrodynamic flow [215,436]. Locke [215] considered the application of volume averaging to the determination of the effective... 

The standard Rodbard-Ogston-Morris-Killander [326,327] model of electrophoresis which assumes that u alua = D nlDa is obtained only for special circumstances. See also Locke and Trinh [219] for further discussion of this relationship. With low electric fields the effective mobility equals the volume fraction. However, the dispersion coefficient reduces to the effective diffusion coefficient, as determined by Ryan et al. [337], which reduces to the volume fraction at low gel concentration but is not, in general, equal to the porosity for high gel concentrations. If no electrophoresis occurs, i.e., and Mp equal zero, the results reduce to the analysis of Nozad [264]. If the electrophoretic mobility is assumed to be much larger than the diffusion coefficients, the results reduce to that given by Locke and Carbonell [218]. 

Slater, GW Guo, HL, Ogston Gel Electrophoretic Sieving How Is the Fractional Volume Available to a Particle Related to Its Mobility and Diffusion Coefficient(s) , Electrophoresis 16,11, 1995. 

Huang, H.Y. et al.. Analysis of food colorants by capillary electrophoresis with large-volume sample stacking, J. Chromatogr. A, 995, 29, 2003. 

Sulfonylureas are not directly amenable to gas chromatography (GC) because of their extremely low volatility and thermal instability. GC has been used in conjunction with diazomethane derivatization, pentafluorobenzyl bromide derivatization, and hydrolysis followed by analysis of the aryl sulfonamides. These approaches have not become widely accepted, owing to poor performance for the entire family of sulfonylureas. Capillary electrophoresis (CE) has been evaluated for water analysis and soil analysis. The low injection volumes required in CE may not yield the required sensitivity for certain applications. Enzyme immunoassay has been reported for chlorsulfuron and triasulfuron, with a limit of detection (LOD) ranging from 20 to 100 ng kg (ppt) in soil and water. 

As in HPLC, the coupling of MS detection with CE has provided an excellent opportunity for more selective analysis, but the much reduced flow rates, small injection volumes, limitations in the types of buffers used [since electrospray ionization (ESI) is used in capillary electrophoresis/mass spectrometry (CE/MS)], and need to... 

M. E. Lacey, A. G. Webb, J. V. Sweedler 2000, (Monitoring temperature changes in capillary electrophoresis with nanoli-ter-volume NMR thermometry), Anal. Chem. 72(20), 4991. 

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