Portable capillary-based (non-chip) capillary electrophoresis

Abstract

Miniaturized, portable instrumentation has been gaining popularity in all areas of analytical chemistry. Capillary electrophoresis (CE), due to its main strengths of high separation efficiency, relatively short analysis time and low consumption of chemicals, is a particularly suitable technique for use in portable analytical instrumentation. In line with the general trend in miniaturization in chemistry utilizing microfluidic chips, the main thrust of portable CE (P-CE) systems development is towards chip-based miniaturized CE. Despite this, capillary-based (non-chip) P-CE systems have certain unmatched advantages, especially in the relative simplicity of the regular cylindrical geometry of the CE capillary, maximal volume-to-surface ratio, no need to design and to fabricate a chip, the low costs of capillary compared to chip, and better performance with some detection techniques. This review presents an overview of the state of the art of P-CE and literature relevant to future developments. We pay particular attention to the development and the potential of miniaturization of functional parts for P-CE. These include components related to sample introduction, separation and detection, which are the key elements in P-CE design. The future of P-CE may be in relatively simple, rugged designs (e.g., using a short piece of capillary fixed to a chip-sized platform on which injection and detection parts can be mounted). Electrochemical detection is well suited for miniaturization, so is probably the most suitable detection technique for P-CE, but optical detection is gaining interest, especially due to miniaturized light sources (e.g., light-emitting diodes).

Liquid Phase – Pulsed Laser Ablation: A route to fabricate different carbon nanostructures

“…The high degree of repeatability and narrow size distribution found for the carbon nanoparticles in this work suggests their possible use as materials for functional separation science applications. A wide variety of device types have been developed within which such CNPs could be incorporated [22,23] for biochemical applications [24].…”

Fibre coupled micro-light emitting diode array light source with integrated band-pass filter for fluorescence detection in miniaturised analytical systems

“…In the area of on-capillary detection including CE, LEDs have been used in miniaturised low-cost detection systems, both photometric [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40] and LED induced fluorimetric (LED-IF) [41][42][43][44][45], with advantages especially for portable CE instruments [46]. A number of LED-IF detection designs for microfluidic chip-based CE [47][48][49][50] systems have been reported as well.…”

Review on the development of truly portable andin-situcapillary electrophoresis systems

“…Whilst the height of the microfluidic device size was not given, the system fitted on top [5] discussed work by various research groups but overlooked the collaboration between many of them, a consequence of which is that it makes the area of non-chip CE look larger than it actually is. A summary of the portable and in-situ non-chip-based CE systems is given in table 1.…”

“…With an increasing demand to perform detailed analysis out in the field, it is no surprise that there have been a large number of attempts at incorporating separation technologies into portable instruments. There have been two primary routes towards the development of portable CE systems: utilizing a shortened capillary or through the use of chip-based micromanufacturing solutions [5,6,11,[15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. The majority of the reported work relates to field-portable or point-of-care devices.…”