Capillary Electrophoresis in Clinical Chemistry

Within the clinical chemistry community, electrophoretic separations are traditionally considered to be of low resolving power, nonquantitative and best suited to high molecular weight species, such as proteins. The instrumentation is simple, relatively inexpensive and cheap to run, but even at their best such electrophoretic methods are only semi-quantitative. High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), on the other hand, is considered to be precise, useful for small molecular weight species, especially drugs, and reproducible, but requires skilled operators. Capillary electrophoresis (CE) combines many of the advantages of HPLC with, I would argue, many of the most attractive features of electrophoresis with respect to biomolecules.