CAPILLARY ELECTROPHORESIS - A POWERFUL TOOL FOR BIOMEDICAL ANALYSIS AND RESEARCH

Capillary electrophoresis (CE) is now at a critical stage in its development when, as with all new analytical techniques, it needs to be accepted by a wider research community and be usefully employed in other disciplines including biomedicine. It offers many attractions to the bioanalyst seeking to separate charged molecules; however, many questions remain unanswered with regard to its applicability and usefulness. In this critical overview we combine literature data with some of our own observations with regard to the application of CE to the separation, detection and quantitation of biomolecules and compare them to our overall and much longer experience with high-performance liquid chromatography. Finally we speculate on the improvements and direction we might like CE to take with respect to the analysis of molecules in biofluids.