Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 24, 2026

Capillary Electrophoresis to Monitor Peptide Grafting onto Chitosan Films in Real Time
Published on: October 26, 2016
Quaternary ammonium substituted agarose as surface coating for capillary electrophoresis
Sara Ullsten1, Lennart Söderberg, Staffan Folestad
1Department of Analytical Chemistry, Uppsala University, P.O. Box 599, SE-751 24 Uppsala, Sweden.
Abstract:
A novel positively charged polymer of quaternary ammonium substituted agarose (Q-agarose) has been synthesized and explored for use as a coating in capillary electrophoresis. The fast and simple coating procedure is based on a multi-site electrostatic interaction between the polycationic agarose polymer and the negatively charged fused-silica surface. By simply flushing fused-silica capillaries with hot polymer solution a positively charged, hydrophilic deactivation layer is achieved. The polymer surface provides an intermediate electroosmotic flow of reversed direction, over a range of pH 2-11, compared to unmodified fused-silica. The coating procedure was highly reproducible with an RSD of 4%, evaluated as the electroosmotic flow mobility for 30 capillaries prepared at 10 different occasions. The application of Q-agarose coated capillaries in separation science was investigated using a set of basic drugs and model proteins and peptides. Due to the intermediate electroosmotic flow generated, the resolution of basic drugs could be increased, compared to using bare fused-silica capillaries. Moreover, the coating enabled separation of proteins and peptides with efficiencies up to 300.000 plates m(-1).
Related Concept Videos
DNA Agarose Gel Electrophoresis
Gel extraction follows five major steps: running gel electrophoresis to separate fragments, isolating the individual bands, extracting DNA from those bands, and removing the dye and salts from the extracted mixture to obtain pure DNA.
In cloning experiments, both the insert and vector DNA...
Capillary Electrophoresis: Applications
Capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) separates ionic components based on their electrophoretic mobility. It has been used to separate proteins, amino acids,...
Capillary Electrophoresis: Instrumentation
Two-dimensional Gel Electrophoresis
The first dimension separation uses the isoelectric focusing or IEF technique performed on immobilized pH gradient (IPG) strips that separate proteins according to their isoelectric points.
Biological samples, such as cells...
SDS-PAGE
A variation of gel electrophoresis, termed polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE), is commonly used for separating proteins according to their molecular size by passing them through a polyacrylamide gel. Because of the varying charges associated with amino acid side chains, PAGE can be used to separate intact proteins...

