Analyte identification in capillary electrophoretic separation techniques

A review on applications of ion-line hyphenation in capillary electrophores is and capillary electrochromatography for the identification of migrating analytes is presented. There is an urgent need for unambiguous analyte iden tification by combining spectral information and observed migration times, because the parameters influencing the migration times and separation effic iencies in these separation techniques are not easily controlled, especiall y when real samples containing unknown interferences have to be analyzed. T he spectrometric techniques covered here are ultraviolet and visible radiat ion (UV/Vis) absorption, fluorescence including fluorescence line-narrowing spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spec trometry. Attention is essentially confined to literature reports in which the extra information provided by the detector is really used for identific ation purposes, especially in real-life samples, while the interfacing as s uch and analyte detectabilities in standard solutions are only briefly disc ussed. This article covers an extensive fraction of the literature publishe d on this topic until the beginning of 1998.