Edman degradation

Phenyl isothiocyanate is reacted with an uncharged N-terminal amino group, under mildly alkaline conditions, to form a cyclical phenylthiocarbamoyl derivative.

A major drawback to this technique is that the peptides being sequenced in this manner cannot have more than 50 to 60 residues (and in practice, under 30).

An advantage of the Edman degradation is that it only uses 10 - 100 pico-moles of peptide for the sequencing process.

[citation needed] Following 2D SDS PAGE the proteins can be transferred to a polyvinylidene difluoride (PVDF) blotting membrane for further analysis.

N-terminal residue sequencing resulting in five to ten amino acid may be sufficient to identify a Protein of Interest (POI).