ABSTRACT
Many routine assays carried out in the clinical setting rely on slab gel electrophoresis for detection of DNA and proteins. Capillaries have catalyzed the first step in miniaturizing this process, having been shown to be an effective alternative to slab gel-based methods while reducing analysis times by roughly an order of magnitude [1,9-11]. In addition, the low volumes of reagents consumed by this electrophoretic process
combined with the miniscule sample requirements bolster the advantages it brings to clinical analysis. The disadvantage associated with the capillary format for electrophoretic analysis is that, while slab gel electrophoresis allows for the parallel processing of a number of samples simultaneously, capillary-based separations usually must be executed one by one. Consequently, any gain through reduction of analysis time is lost by serial analysis. While this yields an overall process time for a batch of samples that is roughly the same with both methods, capillary electrophoresis (CE) still has brought a number of benefits including semiautomation and online detection, both of which are advantageous in the clinical laboratory [12]. Moreover, newer CE instrumental platforms that incorporate multiple capillaries for the concurrent processing of a large number of samples [13-17] have solved the serial analysis problem.
