Progress in microchip enantioseparations

Abstract

Advances in microfluidic chips for chiral separations from 2003 to early 2009 are discussed. Microchip-based separation techniques promise higher speed, throughput, portability, less sample and reagent consumption, better environmental compatibility, reduced cost and the prospect of system integration. Microchip electrophoresis is the most promising technique for miniaturized enantioseparations and has been performed with a variety of designs and analytes, however, other formats such as microchip electrochromatography are also gaining in popularity. Microchip fabrication, chemistry and detection issues are critically discussed and highlighted. Integration of enantioseparation techniques into multifunctional microchips are currently a rapidly advancing area of research and methods are discussed that may eventually enable enantioseparations to be the part of a holistic chemical microchip.

Poly(ethylene glycol)‐coated microfluidic devices for chip electrophoresis

“…After we could prove the performance and the stability of the PEG-coated chips, we investigated their application to improve chiral separations in MCE [47][48][49]. As test compounds we chose FITC-labelled amino acid enantiomers using b-cyclodextrin (b-CD) as chiral selector.…”

Recent progress in capillary electrophoretic analysis of amino acid enantiomers

“…Among them, the importance of MS detection will be growing continuously for biological applications despite the number of publications on the CE-MS analysis of amino acid enantiomers is still limited in the present stage. Considerable developments for combining chiral electrophoretic separation with MS detection are expected in this field as well as progresses of miniaturized and integrated devices [190][191][192][193][194][195][196] for high-speed and high-throughput chiral analysis systems.…”

Chiral electromigration techniques in pharmaceutical and biomedical analysis

“…Thus, one may doubt if CEC will be suitable for routine analysis in the near future. A general trend of further miniaturization is chip technology which has also been applied to chiral separations [161]. If this format can be realized for routine applications such systems will have a great impact for analytical enantioseparations in the future.…”