High performance capillary electrophoresis (HPCE) was born of the marriage of the powerful separation mechanisms of electrophoresis with the instrumentation and automation concepts of chromatography and it has developed into an exciting and extremely powerful analytical technique in recent years. Numerous advantages, such as rapid analysis times, high separation efficiencies, low consumption of chemicals and simplicity of the instrument makes HPCE competitive to other separation techniques. One of the greatest advantages is its diverse application range, mainly due to a numerous modes of separation. Originally considered primarily for the analysis of biological macromolecules, it has proved useful for separations of compounds such as amino acids, vitamins, pesticides, inorganic ions, organic acids, dyes, surfactants, peptides and proteins, carbohydrate, oligonucleotides and DNA restriction fragments, and even whole cells and virus particles. Moreover HPCE makes the separation of chiral compounds possible. However one restraint of the HPCE techniques is the low concentration sensitivity as a consequence of limited optical pathlength for directed on-capillary photometric detection (the most popular HPCE mode of detection) and the limited volume of sample solution that can be injected into the capillary. Therefore one of the greatest challenges in the area of HPCE methods development is to lower limits of detection (LLD) which is at least an order of magnitude higher than in high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Several on-line strategies have been demonstrated to decrease LLD in HPCE, like introducing detector cell with extended pathlenth, powerful detectors i.e., laser-induced fluorescence, on-line preconcentrators with the use of solid-phase extraction materials, coated/impregnated membranes or ion-exchange flow injection system coupled to capillary electrophoresis. Among different remedies, on-capillary concentration techniques are easy to apply and do not require alteration of HPCE instrumentation, which are isotachophoretic preconcentration, sample stacking ( originally developed for ionic compounds, and recently introduced for micellar electrokinetic chromatography (MEKC) sweeping technique. Mechanisms of concentration in diverse techniques are different. The concentration effect in isotachophoresis (ITP) relies on the adjustment of the concentration of the dilute sample to the higher concentration of the leading electrolyte. Preconcentration by ITP can be performed online or in coupled columns. In sample stacking, the concentration effect relies on the difference in electrophoretic velocities between the high- and low-conductivity zones (background electrolyte and sample zones, respectively). Sample stacking technique can be performed in CZE as well as in MEKC mode. From 10 to more than 1000-fold improvements in detector response have been documented. Sweeping , a new concept in MEKC, is defined as the picking and accumulating of analyte molecules by pseudostationary phase that enters and fills the sample zone upon application of voltage. As on-capillary concentration technique, it has provided more than 5000-fold increases in detection sensitivity. Recently developed a cation-selective exhaustive injection and sweeping technique improves peak heights of cation analytes a million-fold.
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