ABSTRACT
The term electrophoresis refers to the migration of ions or
charged particles under the influence of an electric field.
Earlier, the electrophoresis technique was performed in a
gel or other medium in the form of a bed, slab, rod, and
so on, but, due to laborious multistage handling of
supporting media and nonreproducibility of the results,
the supporting medium was replaced by a capillary and
the technique was called capillary electrophoresis (CE).
Basically, the root of modern electrophoresis dates back
to the experiments of Kohlrausch (1897) dealing with
the migration of ions in an electrolyte solution. Later on
Tiselius (1930) separated protein mixtures by electropho-
resis, which led him to the Nobel prize in 1948. The first
CE apparatus was designed by Hjerten (1967), and the
modern era of CE is considered to begin with many publi-
cations of Jorgenson and Lukacs (1981a, b, 1983) describ-
ing instrumentation consisting of a fused silica capillary,
an electrode reservoirs, a high-voltage power supply and
a detector. Although CE had been a topic of discussion
among the scientists, it gained recognition in 1989 with
the first International Symposium on High Performance
Capillary Electrophoresis, which was held in Boston
