Progress of chiral ligand-exchange capillary electrophoresis for enantioseparation

Chiral ligand exchange capillary electrophoresis (CLE-CE) has become an area of tremendous interest in chiral separation science, particularly in life science and pharmaceutical, due to its notable simplicity, tunable migration order, and outstanding performance. This approach effectively separates enantiomers in drugs, food products and bio-samples. Nevertheless, the main challenges in CLE-CE are the limited chiral ligand-species, unclear mechanism of thermodynamic enantioseparation and unsatisfactory enantioseparation efficiency, which restrict its applications. Designing desirable chiral ligand-species and exploring profitable central metal ions are considered to be efficient strategies for addressing these obstacles, which can improve the performance of CLE-CE and expand its application in living bio-systems. This review introduces the concept of desirable chiral ligand species and highlights the latest CLE-CE research in the last decade, with special emphasis on boosting its enantioseparation efficiency and expanding its cutting-edge application. Moreover, further research in the CLE-CE field is prospected.