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Statically adsorbed or covalently coupled capillary coatings are of crucial importance in capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry for the separation of peptides and proteins. So far, published coating strategies and commercially available coated capillaries have a limited pH-stability so that the analysis at strongly acidic pH is limited, or harsh rinsing procedures for biological sample analysis cannot be applied. We here present a capillary coating based on Si-C linkages to N-acryloylamido ethoxyethanol (AAEE) with a new synthetic strategy including LiAlH4 surface reaction. We optimized the coating method with emphasis on stability and reproducibility applying harsh rinsing procedures (strong acid, strong base and organic solvent), using the electroosmotic mobility and separation efficiency of tryptic peptides as performance measure. Complete synthesis is performed in less than 2 days for up to 8 capillaries in parallel of more than 16 m total length. Intra- and inter-batch reproducibility were determined regarding electroosmotic mobility, separation efficiency and migration time precision in CE-MS separations of tryptically digested bovine serum albumin. Coating stability towards rinsing with strong acid (1 mol/L HCl), organic solvent (acetonitrile) and strong base (1 mol/L NaOH) was investigated. Outstanding performance was found for single capillaries. However, inter-capillary reproducibility is discussed critically. The new coating was successfully applied for reproducible CE-MS separation of large proteins in diluted serum, medium-sized peptides and small and highly charged polyamines in fish egg extracts using a very acidic background electrolyte containing 0.75 mol/L acetic acid and 0.25 mol/L formic acid (pH 2.2). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capillary coatings are crucial for high-quality separation performance in capillary electrophoresis analysis of proteins or peptides as they prevent analyte adsorption at the capillary wall. These coating materials have to fulfill many requirements such as a good separation performance and ensuring a good repeatability. The number of commercially available coating materials is still limited, especially with regard to the charge density on the coating material and the induced electroosmotic flow (EOF) velocity. In this work, we compare the separation performance of the novel self-made cationic capillary coating OHNOON and two commercially available coating materials, the acrylamide based, neutral LN® and the cationic hexadimethrine bromide (Polybrene), using the same coating procedure for all three coating materials. The coatings are investigated regarding the separation efficiency, analyte resolution, coating stability, and migration time stability in tryptic peptide analysis. Good separation performance was confirmed for all three coating materials: all coatings provided high plate numbers of up to 400,000-500,000 and a repeatability of the EOF and the analyte migration times in the range of 1 % relative standard deviation or below. Our results reveal a moderate EOF velocity for the novel OHNOON coating in comparison to the Polybrene coating. We present a detailed discussion of the impact of this reduced EOF velocity and the separation performance. The results presented here will help to define the necessary properties of coating materials to achieve the best compromise between speed of analysis and resolution for the respective application. We show that our novel OHNOON coating is especially valuable for the analysis of low mobility analytes and for samples with a broad range of analyte mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]