Microchip capillary electrophoresis

Capillary electrophoresis (CE) is a very generic tool for separation and measurement of all kinds of organic and inorganic ions. In CE, a sample is separated into its components as it migrates through a glass capillary under the driving force of a strong electrical field. Capillaries in conventional CE measure up to 50 cm or even longer.

Microchip CE, a miniaturized form of CE, offers unique possibilities for separation of charged analytes as the high separation efficiency of CE can be combined with the flexibility of chip design and the speed of miniaturized separation. Furthermore, microchip CE offers much better possibilities for integration of extra functionalities resulting in lab-on-a-chip type CE devices.

Capella platform

Capilix has developed the so-called Capella microchip CE platform (see Products page), which is a modular analysis system intended for the R&D laboratory market. The Capella platform is especially useful for determining concentrations of the many different metal ions and other small ions as may be present in aqueous samples, which can be measured simultaneously, i.e., in one run.

This profiling of metal ion composition has several potential applications such as the control of water quality in drinking water plants and process control in waste water treatment. Furthermore, the same instrument can be used for analysis of different classes of ions, e.g., inorganic anions or volatile fatty acids, simply by using adapted assay formats.

On-line microchip CE measurement

Microchip CE measurement platforms are nearly always laboratory systems that have to be loaded with sample in a manual way, just the way the current Capella platform is used. It must be recognized, however, that microchip CE also is considered to be a very promising technology candidate for on-line analysis and monitoring purposes.

A sufficiently high degree of automation is needed in order to enable application of such measurement platform in the field of process monitoring. One major current activity of Capilix therefore is the technological development of automation features covering not only the measurement but also the sampling and sample pre-treatment steps.

CE detector technology

Furthermore, Capilix is pursueing technological development toward a more flexible modular CE platform, enabling integration of various detection methods (electrical conductivity, laser induced fluorescence, refractive index sensing).

One example of this type of technological development is that we currently are implementing refractive index sensing on-chip by further development of our proprietary integrated optics technology. Integrated refractive index sensing is a generic detection technology as it is suited for detection of unlabeled analytes.