Iodoacetamide, is an alkylating agent. It reacts with cysteine residues in proteins. It is often used to modify SH-groups to prevent the re-formation of disulfide bonds after the reduction of cystine residues to cysteine during protein sequencing. What are the other chemicals use for same purpose in amino acid sequencing?
Iodoacetic acid (or iodoacetates) will do the same, albeit the reaction is slower. Since the mechanism is essentially an Sn2, any reagent with a good leaving group will work; but it depends on what you expect to achieve. See this good old paper for starters: http://www.jbc.org/content/114/3/601.full.pdf+html?sid=60fb7e03-5a4f-42fb-bd4e-3f86772cdc9d
Hi Peshala,
You can use a variety of reagents to derivatize cysteines. Vinyl pyridine will pyridylethylate the cysteines, acrylamide will add an acrylamide adduct and as Julius pointed out, iodoacetic acid will add carboxymethyl and iodoacetamide will add carbomidomethyl groups. They are all useful in cases where the property of the cysteine derivatization is helping downstream steps.
Good luck,
Hediye.
Iodoacetamide and N-ethylmaleimide (http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/sial/e3876?lang=en®ion=US) are the most common alkylating reagents. Both are inexpensive and most MS software has these modifications built into the search algorithm.
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