On-line combination of CE and microscopy: an insight into the migration of microorganisms

Identification of microbial contamination by CE has interested many researchers mainly because of the high speed of CE analysis. However, the CE separation of such big structures brings a lot of questions mainly about the behavior of microorganisms and about the mechanism of separation. In this work, we constructed a simple apparatus where a microscope was used as one detector and a UV detector was used as the second one and we made the comparison of three typical setups for CE of microorganisms. Saccharomyces cerevisiae was chosen as a model microorganism and was analyzed in bare fused-silica capillaries, covalently modified capillaries and dynamically modified capillaries by poly(ethylene oxide) or CTAB. Results showed that the use of CE instrument directly connected with a microscope could be advantageous for the study of separation mechanisms and/or migration behavior.