Bundled capillary electrophoresis using microstructured fibres

Joule heating, arising from the electric current passing through the capillary, causes many undesired effects in CE that ultimately result in band broadening. The use of narrow-bore capillaries helps to solve this problem as smaller cross-sectional area results in decreased Joule heating and the rate of heat dissipation is increased by the larger surface-to-volume ratio. Issues arising from such small capillaries, such as poor detection sensitivity, low loading capacity and high flow-induced backpressure (complicating capillary loading) can be avoided by using a bundle of small capillaries operating simultaneously that share buffer reservoirs. Microstructured fibres, originally designed as waveguides in the telecommunication industry, are essentially a bundle of parallel ∼5 μm id channels that extend the length of a fibre having otherwise similar dimensions to conventional CE capillaries. This work presents the use of microstructured fibres for CZE, taking advantage of their relatively high surface-to-volume ratio and the small individual size of each channel to effect highly efficient separations, particularly for dye-labelled peptides.