High-performance capillary electrophoresis using open tubes and gels

Summary This paper overviews several aspects of high performance capillary electrophoresis (HPCE), a promising new method of analytical and micropreparative separation of biochemically important samples. The basic migration equations of electrophoresis are first presented and the benefit of high fields for rapid analysis and high performance emphasized. Since power is generated with high voltages, Joule heating results and this heat must be dissipated. The use of capillary columns is shown to be important in efficient heat removal and in minimizing the temperature differences within the column. The various factors influencing band broadening are next described, and it is shown how plate counts close to 10⁶ can be achieved. Various results from our laboratory on open tube and gel columns are then presented to illustrate the potential of this method. Chiral resolution of dansylated amino acids using a chiral metal chelate micelle in open tube HPCE is shown. With the gel columns, the baseline separation of a 2-chain variant from methionine growth hormone (met-hGH) under non-denaturing conditions at fields close to 1000 V/cm is presented. Finally, the micropreparative purification of a 20-mer oligonucleotide using the gel column is described.