How to achieve higher repeatability and reproducibility in capillary electrophoresis

The influence of experimental parameters on precision of migration times and accuracy of integration has been studied. The repeatability of migration times strongly depends on the proper selection of the rinse steps between each run of a CE system. The rinse steps have to be optimized additionally with each separation system. This is especially important for systems providing an anodic electroosmotic flow. The errors introduced by the integration software were studied by transferring the same data sets to different commercial available integration softwares. A strategy for the transfer of raw data files between several softwares is described. By using systems with identical peak areas or with identical peak heights it could be shown that the newly introduced softwares can cope better with the leading or tailing peaks. The RSD of quantitation strongly depends on the signal-to-noise ratio. At SIN ratios larger than 35 no differences between the various softwares studied could be observed. At lower SIN ratios the newly released softwares are to be preferred. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.