A new capillary electrophoretic method was developed for enantiomeric separation and optical impurity analysis of three synthetic 2,3-dihydroxy3-phenylpropionate compounds using native P-cyclodextrin (P-CD) as chiral selector and borate as a background electrolyte. The separation was carried out in uncoated capillary (58.5 cm x 75 mu m I.D., effective length 48.5 cm). The results showed that beta-CD as the chiral selector exhibited good enantioselectivity and the baseline separation was obtained at pH 9.8, 200 mM borate buffer containing 1.7% P-CD at applied voltage 15kV and capillary temperature 20 degrees C within 15 min. The precision of each tested compound was less than 1.0% at migration time and 5.0% in corrected peak area and the accuracy of the method was in the range of 98.7-105%. Furthermore, the developed method was successfully applied to the determination of the undesirable trace (2S,3R)-(+)-form impurity in the synthetic (2R,3S)-(-)-2,3-dihydroxy-3-phenylpropionate samples. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.