Thirty years of capillary electrophoresis in food analysis laboratories: Potential applications

Abstract

CE has generated considerable interest in the research community since instruments were introduced by different trading companies in the 1990s. Nowadays, CE is popular due to its simplicity, speed, highly efficient separations and minimal solvent and reagent consumption; it can also be included as a useful technique in the nanotechnology field and it covers a wide range of specific applications in different fields (chemical, pharmaceutical, genetic, clinical, food and environmental). CE has been very well evaluated in research laboratories for several years, and different new approaches to improve sensitivity (one of the main drawbacks of CE) and robustness have been proposed. However, this technique is still not well accepted in routine laboratories for food analysis. Researching in data bases, it is easy to find several electrophoretic methods to determine different groups of analytes and sometimes they are compared in terms of sensitivity, selectivity, precision and applicability with other separation techniques. Although these papers frequently prove the potential of this methodology in spiked samples, it is not common to find a discussion of the well-known complexity of the matrices to extract analytes from the sample and/or to study the interferences in the target analytes. Summarizing, the majority of CE scientific papers focus primarily on the effects upon the separation of the analytes while ignoring their behavior if these analytes are presented in real samples.

Food Analysis: Present, Future, and Foodomics

“…Other techniques as gas chromatography (GC) still have an important role in food analysis, for instance, for the analysis of volatile fractions or fatty acids in foods [20]. Electrodriven separation techniques such as capillary electrophoresis (CE) or microchip capillary electrophoresis have found important applications in food analysis as can be deduced from the many review works devoted to this topic [21,22], including the detection of genetically modified organisms [23,24], nucleosides and nucleotides in foods [25], analysis of contaminants in emerging food safety issues and food traceability [26], and food-borne pathogens [27].…”

Sulfonamides in the environment: a review and a case report

“…Review articles, published in 2009Review articles, published in , 2010Review articles, published in and 2011 Table 3. All important topics are covered, e.g., general information on common types of sulfonamides polluting the environment (Baran et al 2011;Zhang and Li 2011), sample preparation (Namera et al 2011;Samanidou and Karageorgou 2011), and analytical methods used for sulfonamide detection, namely HPLC (Seifrtova et al 2009;Tolika et al 2010), capillary electrophoresis (Garcia-Campana et al 2009;Pinero et al 2011), and immunoassays (Nesterenko et al 2009). Some reviews deal with resistance (Le-Minh et al 2010;Jury et al 2011), or the degradation of different pollutants, sulfonamides included (Sharma 2010).…”

Profiling of water-soluble carbohydrates in pine and spruce extracts by capillary zone electrophoresis with direct UV detection

“…However, the majority of the scientific papers on CE concentrate on the possibilities of the different methods through the separation of different analytes. The matrix effects appear especially in cases where sample pretreatments are inadequate for the utilized method conditions, which can be altered, for example by dilution solutions, background electrolyte or capillary wall (Piñero et al 2011). These aspects should be taken into consideration when applying a CE method to real process samples.…”

“…CE is a well-established analytical method with various applications in the fields of pharmaceutical, environmental and food analysis (Altria 1999;Whatley 2001;Piñero et al 2011;Deeb et al 2014). The technique is based on applying high electric voltage over a background electrolyte solution to separate any charged compounds (Altria 1999).…”