Multisegment injections improve peptide identification rates in capillary zone electrophoresis-based bottom-up proteomics

While capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) provides dramatically improved numbers of peptide identifications compared with reversed-phase chromatography for bottom-up proteomics of mass limited samples, CZE inevitably produces lower numbers of peptide identifications than RPLC for larger samples. One reason for this poorer performance is the dead time between injection of samples and subsequent appearance of the fastest moving component. This dead time is typically 25% of the separation window in CZE, but is only 5% of the separation window in gradient elution RPLC. This dead time can be eliminated in CZE by use of a multisegment injection mode where a series of samples is analyzed by injecting each sample while the preceding sample is still being separated. In this paper, we demonstrate that capillary zone electrophoresis employing sequential injections can produce a doubling in peptide identification rate with no degradation in separation efficiency.