Capillary zone electrophoresis for bottom-up analysis of complex proteomes

Capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) is emerging as a useful tool in proteomic analysis. Interest arises from dramatic improvements in performance that result from improvements in the background electrolyte used for the separation, the incorporation of advanced sample injection methods, the development of robust and sensitive electrospray interfaces, and the coupling with Orbitrap mass spectrometers with high resolution and sensitivity. The combination of these technologies produces performance that is rapidly approaching the performance of UPLC-based methods for microgram samples and exceeds the performance of UPLC-based methods for mid- to low nanogram samples. These systems now produce over 10 000 peptide IDs in a single 100-min analysis of the HeLa proteome.