Cover Picture: Electrophoresis 20'2011

Issue no. 20 is a special issue on “Amino Acids, Peptides and Proteins” consisting of 19 contributions distributed over 5 distinct parts. “The high application potential of CE and CEC for amino acid, peptide and protein analysis, preparation and physicochemical and biochemical characterization is reflected in the current special issue... New approaches to the theoretical description of electromigration properties of proteins and peptides show that through the modeling of their CE determined effective electrophoretic mobilities, the important physicochemical parameters, such as effective charge, Stokes radius, acidity constants of ionogenic groups, hydration and conformations of their molecules can be estimated. Novel methodologies, e.g. combination of solid phase extraction and field amplified sample injection for pre‐separation and preconcentration of peptides from complex biomatrices prior to their CE analyses, preparative scale isoelectric trapping demonstrated by isolation of amino acids, iron nanoparticles‐based separation of phosphorylated and non‐phosphorylated proteins, new ways of size separation of proteins by CE with cationic hitchhiking or by fast capillary gel electrophoresis, preparation of monolithic immobilized pH gradients for isoelectric focusing of proteins and two‐dimensional separations of complex peptide and protein mixtures by CE‐mass spectrometry (MS) and LC‐MS, are widely presented in this special issue... The applications of CE and CEC methods include determination of low abundant amino acids and peptides in complex matrices of wines and brain microdialysate by using high‐sensitive laser induced fluorescence detection, peptide mapping of proteins by CE off‐line coupled to MALDI‐MS, investigation of peptide interactions with porphyrins by open tubular CEC, estimation of isoelectric point of human carbonic anhydrase isoforms by capillary isoelectric focusing and distinguishing of endogenous human hemoglobin from synthetic hemoglobin‐based oxygen carriers by CE in doping control.” Featured articles include: Global conformations of proteins as predicted from the modeling of their CZE mobility data (( 10.1002/elps.201100016 )) Preparative‐scale isoelectric trapping by recursive electrophoresis in a compartmentalized system having orthogonal primary and secondary pH gradients. Part 1. Construction and standard operation (( 10.1002/elps.201100119 )) Fast analysis of amino acids in wine by capillary electrophoresis with laser‐induced fluorescence detection (( 10.1002/elps.201100112 )) Solid‐phase extraction‐field‐amplified sample injection coupled with CE‐ESI‐MS for online pre‐concentration and quantitative analysis of brain‐gut peptides (( 10.1002/elps.201100591 )) Integrated platform of capillary isoelectric focusing, trypsin immobilized enzyme microreactor and nanoreversed‐phase liquid chromatography with mass spectrometry for online protein profiling (( 10.1002/elps.201100030 ))