Influence of the ionic strength of acidic background electrolytes on the separation of proteins by capillary electrophoresis.

The ionic strength is one of the key parameters for optimizing CE separations. However, only a few data are available in the literature about the ionic strength effect on the separation of proteins. The effect of ionic strength on separation performances is rather complex since many different parameters are involved: such as the protein effective mobility, the electroosmotic mobility, the separation efficiency via the electromigration dispersion, as well as the viscosity and temperature of the background electrolyte. In the present work, the influence of ionic strength on the electrophoretic separation of five model proteins has been investigated in acidic conditions, on successive multi-ionic layers coated capillary, in counter-electroosmotic mode with anodic electroosmotic flow. The decrease in effective and electroosmotic mobilities with increasing ionic strength were compared using the slope-plot approach, which is very helpful for understanding the observed changes in apparent selectivity and resolution. The relative decrease of the protein effective mobility was about 30-40% of the mobility determined at 5mM ionic strength per ionic strength decade. It was found that relatively low ionic strength (∼5-10mM) was preferable to optimize the overall separation of the five model proteins.

Polyelectrolyte multilayer coatings for the separation of proteins by capillary electrophoresis: Influence of polyelectrolyte nature and multilayer crosslinking.

The present work aims at studying the influence of the nature of the polyelectrolytes used in successive multiple ionic polymers on the performances of protein separation in acetic acid volatile background electrolyte. A broad library of polyelectrolyte multilayers was compared on the basis of 9 different weak/strong polyanions and 8 different weak/strong polycations. More than 20 couples of different polyelectrolytes were investigated. The separation efficiencies (expressed as the N/l ratio, where N is the plate number and l is the capillary effective length) were systematically compared for the separation of a protein test mixture. The coating stability was evaluated by the relative standard deviation of the migration times. For weak polyelectrolyte multilayers, the influence of the polymer crosslinking on the coating stability and separation efficiency has been studied. Intra-day repeatability of 100 successive runs, and capillary-to-capillary reproducibility were tested on coatings of each category (crosslinked and non crosslinked). The main (not obvious) result rising from this study is that the nature of the polyanion constituting the multilayers is of primary importance for the performance in terms of separation efficiency and stability, even when the mulilayers finish with a polycation.