Hadamard Transform Capillary Electrophoresis

This paper reports the first demonstration of a multiplex sample injection technique in capillary electrophoresis. The sample was injected into a capillary (effective length, 4 cm) as a pseudorandam Hadamard sequence by a photodegradation technique using a high-power gating laser, and the fluorescence signal, which was measured using a probe excitation beam, was decoded by an inverse Hadamard transformation. The signal-to-noise ratio was improved by a factor of 8, which was in good agreement with the theoretically predicted value of 8.02. This approach is potentially useful for the enhancement of the sensitivity by 3 orders of magnitude in high-resolution capillary electrophoresis, combined with fluorescence detection.