The molecular end effect and its critical impact on the behavior of charged-uncharged polymer conjugates during free-solution electrophoresis.

Recently two novel techniques using free-solution electrophoresis to separate charged-uncharged polymer conjugates have proven successful: end-labeled free-solution electrophoresis (ELFSE) for DNA sequencing, and free-solution conjugate electrophoresis (FSCE) for molar mass profiling of uncharged polymers. The approach taken to analyze the experimental data was an extension of the theory of Long and co-workers (Long, D., Dobrynin, A. V., Rubinstein, M., Ajdari, A., J. Chem. Phys. 1998, 108, 1234-1244) for the electrophoresis of molecules with varying charge distributions. This theory also predicts that the ends of the polymers play a large role in determining the polymer's overall mobility; however, this aspect of the theory was neglected in previous work. Until now this "end effect" has, to the knowledge of the authors, not been recognized in experimental data. Through a careful investigation of the predicted end effect and a reanalysis of the experimental data, we demonstrate that indeed this effect critically impacts on the behavior of charged-uncharged polymer conjugates during electrophoresis. This work indicates that not only does the end effect need to be taken into account to avoid significant errors in data analysis, but also it provides novel system optimization approaches.