Chip-based hyphenations

If total analysis systems are not exactly the best option for polymer/additive analysis, then neither are chip-based hyphenations. The reasons here are completely different minute sample size (homogeneity problems for more traditional samples), and (theoretical) limits to chromatography and concentration-based sensitivity, etc. 

Capillary isoelectric focusing (CIEF) is a high-resolution technique for protein and peptide separation performed at academic sites and in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries for the analysis and characterization of, for example, recombinant antibodies and other recombinant proteins, isoforms of glycoproteins, point mutations in hemoglobin, and peptide mapping. Also, hyphenation to mass spectrometry and chip-based CIEF (microfabrication) have shown promise. CIEF kits and specific recipes/application notes are available from vendors of capillary electrophoresis (CE) equipment, as are a vast amount of publications and handbooks of CE published over recent years. 

The future technological advances in drug discovery will likely involve separation sciences, MS, and hyphenated techniques. More detailed discussions on the technology development and future trends in bioanalysis, laboratory automation, and MS instrumentation have been elaborated in other chapters. Therefore, only three technologies are specifically addressed with regard to their potential application in drug discovery pSFC monolithic column technologies and chip-based separations. 

The devices based on microfluidic chip-capillary electrophoresis (microchip-CE) make use of the microfluidic chip technology for sample preparation and pretreatment prior to highly efficient separation by capillary electrophoresis using commercially available instrumentation. A list of the research and development work performed using the hyphenated microfluidic chip-CE technique is given in Table 2, showing three major areas of application. 

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