Are you thinking of Ethanethiol / ethyl mercaptan? I can't find reference to 2-Mercaptoethanol being used as an odorant.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanethiol
Re:Stench gas
by Herodotus38 on Friday June 09, 2017 @10:49PM
(#14525910)
Thanks for the additional note, I haven't done lab work in many years and that is more correct.
It smells like sulfur + burnt rice crackers to me... It's actually not that dangerous of a compound - I've spilled it on myself gloveless and it's not a big deal.
Also a bit of a possibly overpedantic note - you can run gels without reducing the disulfide bonds, but typically those proteins will run through the gel faster, not slower because of a more compact form. Because not all proteins have disulfides, if you reduce them first, it creates a predictable relationship between the protein size and the migration velocity, which is the desirable property, not speed.