Capillary electrophoresis separation of oligosaccharides: I. Effect of operational variables

The influence of operating variables on the separation of labeled oligosaccharide molecules in capillary electrophoresis with polymer networks is presented. In this study, an equation was derived that relates the effects of electrophoresis variables such as field strength, temperature, molecular weight and gel concentration to the migration velocity. As a model system, 8-aminonaphthalene-1,3,6-trisulfonate ANTS-labeled wheat starch digest was examined to show the validity of the equation. As an illustration of the high resolving power achievable with capillary electrophoresis, oligosaccharide molecules up to the degree of polymerization of 25 were separated with the very high efficiency of N > 10(6) and efficiency generation rate of 3500 plates/m/s for maltose. Separation based on the size of the oligosaccharides was not obtained with either entangled or unentangled polymer solutions.