Identification of chemical modification sites on metalloproteins by capillary electrophoresis.

Capillary electrophoresis (CE) has been used to separate the peptides obtained from tryptic digestion of ruthenium-modified cytochrome c. The modified peptide was identified from a comparison of the elution profile and absorbance characteristics of the native and modified proteins. Automatic fraction collection on the CE instrument provides sufficient amounts of this modified peptide for amino acid sequencing. Capillary electrophoresis has also been used to monitor the modification reaction and to optimize the modification efficiency. The methodologies have been extended to myoglobin in order to monitor the modification of multiple surface sites.