Ultra-High Resolution Separation Comes of Age

Abstract

Born in the late 1960s (1), popularized in its infancy for its high resolution (2), and reaching puberty in the mid 1980s with the introduction of commercial instrumentation (3), capillary electrophoresis (CE) has finally entered adulthood as a reliable and widely useful analytical technology. In 1937, Nobel Prize-winner Arne Tiselius first described electrophoresis, a method for separating charged molecules in an externally applied electric field. With the introduction of agarose and polyacrylamide gels, electrophoresis evolved as the principal means of high-resolution biopolymer (e.g., DNA, protein, and glycan) analysis. Gel electrophoresis, however, remains a qualitative, time-consuming, and labor-intensive analytical method. As we enter the new millennium, we have begun to realize the potential of CE for the automated and rapid analysis of complex mixtures with high resolution and high sensitivity.