Fluorogenic Edman Reagent

The Edman degradation method has been widely used for sequence analysis of peptides and proteins. For this reason, it has been a very important tool in the field of biochemistry and biomedical science. Although phenyl isothiocyanate is generally employed for the Edman degradation method, more sensitive the Edman reagents were needed. Recently, K. Imai and co-workers have developed a novel fluorogenic Edman reagent 1^1,2) which has the following advantages;

(1) Stable and non-fluorescent prior to derivatization.
(2) DBD-carbamoyl(CA) amino acids are stable and have strong fluorescence intensity.
(3) DBD-CA amino acids are separated on a reversed-phase HPLC column and detected at the sub-picomole level.
(4) Used for the determination of the amino acid sequence and the D/L-amino acid configuration.
(5) Used as a fluorogenic labeling reagent for amino groups.