ABSTRACT
I. SCOPE This chapter will give an overview of ACE applications for the investigation of drug-protein and protein-protein interactions. It starts with a short introduction on the available experimental setups and methods used for the determination of binding constants. The discussion of drug-protein interactions begins with drug binding to receptor proteins, which function as drug targets to exhibit a pharmacological effect. This is followed by a discussion of the binding of drugs to plasma proteins, which usually function as transport proteins. The possibility of studying the stereoselectivity and especially the enantioselectivity of drug-protein interactions by ACE is also examined. This includes an overview of applications where proteins are used as chiral selectors for the separation of drug enantiomers by capillary electrophoresis. These are not ACE investigations with the aim of calculating binding constants. However, enantiomeric separations are increasingly important in the pharmaceutical industry and one of the applications where the advantages of capillary electrophoresis count most. On the other hand, applications dealing with interactions to antibodies are not included in this chapter. Readers interested in this field are referred to Chapter 12 of this book, "Characterization of Immunoreactions." Applications dealing with immobilized species on the capillary, such as polymer networks and imprinted polymers, and very recent developments in capillary gel electrophoresis
(CGE) and capillary electrochromatography (CEC) are also not covered. The authors took care to include all relevant references. Nevertheless, some noteworthy investigations may have been overlooked. Readers more interested in this specific field of ACE are therefore referred to recent reviews (1-7) that deal especially with different aspects of drug-protein binding interactions.
