Analytical Chemistry

(Chris Devlin) #1
CAPS 10.40

phosphate 12.32 (pKa3)

CZE is finding a wide range of applications, mostly in the biochemical, clinical and pharmaceutical
fields where it is becoming a rival to HPLC as the technique of choice. Amino acids, peptides and
proteins, including glycoproteins have all been successfully separated, generally with higher
efficiencies, better resolution, and more quickly than by HPLC and at nanogram to picogram levels.
Peptide mapping, or protein fingerprinting, where the identity of a protein is established from the
peptide sequence after chemical or enzymatic cleavage into peptide fragments, the detection of drugs
and their metabolites in biological fluids such as blood, plasma and urine, and the determination of
inorganic cations and anions in aqueous samples are examples of the increasing use of this technique.


Micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatography (MEKC or MECC) is a more versatile technique than
CZE due to its ability to separate neutral as well as ionic species. The term chromatography is used
because a surfactant added to the buffer solution forms spherical aggregates of molecules

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