EVALUATION OF SERUM-PROTEIN SEPARATION BY CAPILLARY ELECTROPHORESIS -PROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS OF 1000 SPECIMENS

To critically assess the method of capillary electrophoresis (CE) we e xamined 1000 prospective serum samples submitted for protein electroph oresis by both high-resolution agarose gel electrophoresis (HRAGE) and CE. CE was performed using a 72 cm (50 cm to detector) x 50 mu m LD. fused-silica capillary with detection of absorbance at 200 nn. The 100 0 samples examined contained 362 monoclonal paraproteins with concentr ations ranging from 1 to 71 g/l. We evaluated the individual paraprote in correlations, the overall correlation between the two methods being 0.96. We found that HRAGE gave slightly higher values for the monoclo nal bands than CE and the difference was statistically significant, We conclude that CE is a viable alternative to HRAGE for the determinati on of protein dyscrasias in a routine clinical laboratory.