The use of capillary electrophoresis for point-mutation screening

Advances in capillary electrophoresis technology over the past three years have been rapid. Capillary electrophoresis offers high-throughput, high-resolution, automatic operation and on-line detection with automatic data acquisition, and this has stimulated its application to the analysis of DNA mutations. Many different PCR-based DNA-mutation assays have been developed for unknown and known mutations. This article compares conventional PCR-based mutation-detection assays with the methods developed for use with capillary electrophoresis. Future trends for mutation detection using capillary electrophoresis are also assessed, with a special emphasis on totally integrated, microchip capillary-electrophoresis-based mutation-detection systems.