Capillary Electrophoresis

Capillary electrophoresis (CE) has recently become an established method with widespread recognition as an analytical technique of choice in numerous analytical laboratories, including industrial and academic sectors. Pharmaceutical and biochemical research and quality control are the most important CE applications. This book describes recent developments in and applications of CE that are related to (i) compounds of pharmaceutical interest (e.g., drugs, natural products, metabolites, impurities in formulations); (ii) pharmaceutical applications in quality control, drug monitoring, drug interactions, drug metabolism, estimation of physicochemical properties, etc.; and (iii) method development, which includes sample preparation (e.g., in-capillary preconcentration techniques), capillary coating, stationary phases, (enantio)separations (e.g., design of experiments, chiral selectors), and miniaturization.

The book also describes new trends in these areas. It introduces the fundamentals of CE and is aimed at beginners in this field. It clearly outlines the procedures used to mitigate several barriers, such as detection limits, signal detection, changing capillary environment, resolution separation of analytes, and hyphenation of mass spectrometry with CE, for a range of analytical problems. Each chapter outlines a specific electrophoretic variant with detailed instructions and some standard operating procedures. Where necessary, the authors summarize the reported works in tables. All in all, this book provides a comparative assessment of related techniques on mode selection, method development, detection, and quantitative analysis and estimation of pharmacokinetic parameters and broadens the understanding of modern CE applications, developments, and future prospects. In that respect, the book meets its desired goal of rendering assistance to lovers of electrophoresis.

Most books on CE appear to be quite general and include fundamentals, instrumentation, and methods, while some are more specific, covering certain aspects in biochemical or clinical areas. The authors have narrowed their focus and explored CE applications of pharmaceutical interest that are not covered in other books.