Recent advances and trends in capillary electrophoresis of inorganic ions

Capillary electrophoresis (CE) continues its invasion into the domain of inorganic analysis. This review summarizes the progress and significant developments of CE of inorganic ions over the first two years of the new century. As manifested by the substantial number of published articles, this field is still witnessing a growing activity of many separation scientists. To provide an in-depth treatment of fundamental and methodological aspects of inorganic ion analysis by CE, an extensive fraction of the relevant literature is covered whereas only most innovative application reports are briefly considered. Most of the recent advancements have focused on CE system modernization designed to improve a limited detection sensitivity, which still remains a major obstacle to overcome in order to ensure the method's wider practical acceptance. Attention is also given to how and in which directions the future research could be performed to implement CE in routine inorganic analysis.