General description
2-mercaptoethanol is a thiol compound,[1] commonly used
as a reducing agent in organic reactions.[2]
Application
2-mercaptoethanol is widely used for retarding oxidation of
biological compounds in solution.
BME is suitable for reducing protein disulfide bonds prior
to polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and is usually included in a sample
buffer for SDS-PAGE at a concentration of 5%. Cleaving intermolecular (between
subunits) disulfide bonds allows the subunits of a protein to separate
independently on SDS-PAGE. Cleaving intramolecular (within subunit) disulfide
bonds allows the subunits to become completely denatured so that each peptide
migrates according to its chain length with no influence due to secondary
structure.
