Long Term Analyses with Capillary Electrophoresis

This month’s instalment of “CE Currents” deals with problems that may arise when using capillary electrophoresis for unattended, long-term operation. The guest authors look at issues such as sample carryover, evaporation effects, capillary conditioning, capillary surface changes, buffer handling, capillary breakage and detector-lamp deterioration. They provide several technical recommendations for stabilizing the electrophoretic system and increasing reproducibility.

Because commercial capillary electrophoresis (CE) instruments have been available for a decade, CE has become a mature and well-established analytical tool. CE is extensively used for routine analysis as an alternative or complementary technique to high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Many of the technical problems have been solved, and handling the instruments has become effortless. Nevertheless, several problems may arise during long-term sequences, but they are unnoticeable when only a few runs are performed.
 
One major disadvantage of CE in comparison to HPLC is its poor precision. The experimental conditions must be controlled accurately during an extended period; for example, when performing stability tests, observing the course of a reaction or analysing a large number of samples. CE users can improve reproducibility by paying attention to several, sometimes simple, technical details.

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