From capillary electrophoresis to capillary electrochromatography: an overview

Abstract

In recent years, capillary electrophoresis (CE) has appeared as an alternative separation technique effective for a very wide spectrum of analytes, from the small lithium ions to DNA macromolecules, and will be widely used in the coming years. The advantages of CE are the very short separation time, very small amounts of sample requirement (in the nL range), high separation efficiency, and very economical columns. The CE technique, having started with the separation of charged particles under high voltage, is now effective with the same experimental set-up on uncharged particles as well, with the development of capillary electrokinetic chromatography (CEKC) and, most recently, the capillary electrochromatography (CEC), which is a hybrid of CE and HPLC. Here, CEKC and CEC will be briefly described.