Capillary Electrophoresis Instrument

Capillary Electrophoresis (CE), also called Capillary Zone Electrophoresis (CZE) is a technique used for DNA size separation. In it, fluorescent intercalating dyes are used to visualize the DNA and also to promote the resolution of closely spaced alleles. There is a detection window present in the capillary to monitor the migration of the DNA fragments. In traditional electrophoresis, electrically charged analytes move in a conductive liquid medium under the influence of an electric field.

What is Capillary Electrophoresis?

Electrophoresis is used in many scientific disciplines for separating, quantifying, enriching and purifying biomolecules that differ in their electrical charge or polarity. In essence, capillary electrophoresis is a system for DNA size separation. There are many capillary electrophoresis techniques through which this job is done.

Capillary Electrophoresis Techniques

Following capillary electrophoresis techniques are used for DNA separation.

Capillary Zone Electrophoresis (CZE)- It is the most popularly used mode of CE and is applied for separation of both- anionic and cationic solutes in a single analysis.

Capillary Gel Electrophoresis (CGE)- It is the CE-analog of traditional slab-gel electrophoresis and is applied for the size-based separation of biological macromolecules such as oligonucleotides, DNA restriction fragments and proteins.

Capillary Isoelectric Focusing (CIEF)- It is applied to separate biological molecules, majorly proteins based on differences between the isoelectric points (pI).

Micellar Electrokinetic Chromatography (MEKC)- This mode of CE is used to separate neutral as well as charged solutes.

Isotachophoresis (ITP)- It applies two different buffer systems. The solutes are sandwiched between leading and trailing electrolytes, creating a steady state where the solute zones migrate in order of decreasing mobility.

Capillary Electrochromatography (CEC)- It is a fusion of liquid chromatography (LC) and CE. CEC leads to high efficiency separation of neutral compounds within very short analysis times.

Capillary Electrophoresis Instruments

Traditional capillary electrophoresis instrumentation is a simple system. For such capillary electrophoresis system, the main components are a sample vial, source and destination vials, a capillary, electrodes, a high-voltage power supply, a detector, and a data output and handling device. However, the new high performance electrophoresis instruments are quite complex as compared to the 2d gel electrophoresis instruments. Such capillary electrophoresis instruments automate the CE separation process with high reproducibility of analytical results like peak areas and migration times. A diode array detector with an optimized optical path including an extended lightpath capillary is there in many CE systems that provide spectral information with high detection sensitivity. In such high performance capillary electrophoresis instruments, the liquid handling and sample injection systems are designed for flexibility with user friendly approach. Some of the CE systems available with the present day capillary electrophoresis manufacturers have been described as under.

Capillary Electrophoresis System

The modern capillary electrophoresis system offers fast separations with resolution for analytical challenges. Most of them bring HPLC-like sensitivity to a wide range of analytical challenges. In many of such CE system, several separation modes can be run on a single instrument. Send Online Enquiry for all types of capillary electrophoresis instruments including 2D Gel Electrophoresis, Automated Capillary Electrophoresis and Capillary Electrophoresis Instrument with MS detection.

Capillary Electrophoresis Instrument with MS detection

Such CE instruments combine the short analysis time and high separation efficiency of capillary electrophoresis with the molecular weight and structural information from the Mass Selective Detector (MS).

Automated Capillary Electrophoresis Instrument

The modern automated capillary electrophoresis systems are fully automated solutions for gel electrophoresis. The highly automated CE instruments can give analyzed results in as less as 1 minute per sample. These biomolecular and biotechnology lab equipment load, separate, catch image and analyze the samples.

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