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

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.