Capillary and microchip electrophoresis: challenging the common conceptions

Capillary electrophoresis (CE) has long been regarded as a powerful analytical separation technique that is an alternative to more traditional methods such as gel electrophoresis (GE) and liquid chromatography (LC). It is often touted as having a number of advantages over both of these, such as speed, flexibility, portability, sample and reagent requirements and cost, but also a number of disadvantages such as reproducibility and sensitivity. Microchip electrophoresis (ME), the next evolutionary step, miniaturised CE further providing improvements in speed and sample requirements as well as the possibility to perform more complex and highly integrated analyses. CE and ME are seen as a viable alternative to GE, but are often considered to be inferior to LC. This review will consider the strengths and weaknesses of both CE and ME and will challenge the common conceptions held about these.