High performance capillary electrophoresis miniaturization

For many years, miniaturization has been used to improve separation performance in chemical analysis. Since first demonstrated over 25 years ago, capillary electrophoresis (CE) has been found to offer many advantages compared to slab gel electrophoresis, and CE has become a powerful technique for the analysis of complex biological samples due to its high efficiency and ease of automation. ... 

Capillary Electrophoresis Chips. Some of the first microchip-CE separations have been performed on glass chips that used on-chip miniaturized pneumatic nebulizers, or on-chip or off-chip liquid junction interfaces coupled to a subatmospheric ESI ion trap instrument. - High-efficiency ( 31,000 plates/chip or 300,000 plates/m) separations on 11 cm long channels, or fast separations on 4.5 cm channels, of peptide/protein samples were achieved (Figure 53.17). Some of these chips were also tested for performing transient isotachophoretic sample preconcentration. ... 

Chemical analysis systems, such as spectrophotometry, high-performance liquid chromatography, capillary electrophoresis and immunoassays, always consist of a combination of a reaction or separation and a detection system. In the following section, some generic features for chemical reactions and separations are addressed, and the major conventional detection techniques as well as the integration and miniaturization of optical components used in chemical analysis are briefly reviewed. In the key... 

The boom in microanalysers started aroimd 1994. Laborious sample treatment procedures and other peripheral operations were performed in reactor columns connected upstream or downstream from the central part. Highly efficient instruments, like a miniature mass spectrometer, became available. Amperometric detectors became the standard device for flow systems since they could be miniaturized easily. They are foimd primarily in liquid chromatographic /i-TASs as well as in such systems which work on the principle of capillary electrophoresis. 

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