Capillary electrophoresis: a product of technological fusion - Technical

Hewlett-Packard Journal, June, 1995 by Robert R. Holloway

The Future of CE: Integrated Liquid-Phase Analysis

CE will continue to find applications. Its growth rate as a liquid-phase analytical method will be higher than its more mature cousin, LC. Most of LC's applications are firmly entrenched and sufficient for immediate needs. Improvements in these will be incremental enhancements involving a variety of techniques including CE.

CE in the future will likely be a part of a complex strategy. Workers are now combining the unique separating power and efficiency of CE with the versatility of LC and the mass spectrometer's ability to identify unknowns. New forms of separation continue to spin off the CE experiment (most recently CEC, or capillary electrochromatography) and will also play a part in the integrated future of liquid-phase analysis.

HP Laboratories and CE

Douglass McManigill of HP Laboratories became interested in CE as a result of the publication of Professor Jim Jorgenson's first paper describing the use of fused silica capillaries for electrophoresis.(2) McManigill, in what is now the chemical systems department of the Analytical/Medical Laboratory of HP Laboratories, was working in the area of supercritical fluid chromatography, but was intensely interested in the physics of transport processes. Along with Henk Lauer of the HP Waldbronn Analytical Division, he built a CE apparatus and began an investigation of the CE separation process.

At roughly the same time, Paul Bente and Joel Myerson of HP Genenchem were working on an electrophoresis instrument to do gel separations of proteins and peptides. While they had limited success instrumentally, the pressurized gel synthesis they invented was the only reproducible technique for making the gels for several years.

In time, Lauer left the company, and over several years, McManigill led the project, working with many others, including Sally Swedberg, who later worked in Waldbronn on CE, mechanical engineer Stu Lerner, who is no longer with HP, Jim Young, mechanical engineer and designer whose contributions included a method of coating columns with a resistive layer, Mark Bateman, computer scientist and electrical engineer, who created the first software for the instrument, mechanical engineer John Christianson, who worked on the first prototype and is now at the HP Vancouver Division, the author, a chemist from the medical group at HP Laboratories, Don Rose from Jorgenson's group at the University of North Carolina, Jurgen Lux from Max-Planck Institut fur Kohleforschung in Mulheim, Germany, Cathy Keely, an engineer who made hundreds of CE runs to explore the unexpected behavior of columns with a conductive coating, Tom van de Goor, a former student of Everaerts in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, who also joined the study of the control of electroosmotic flow, and Wes Cole, an electrical engineer who modeled electric fields at the ends of capillaries.

Another group at HP Laboratories, led by Gary Gordon, worked on several issues surrounding a CE instrument. Physicist Dick Lacey helped design a detector. Gary developed the "bubble cell," which offers a greater optical path length. An automated system for the fabrication of bubble cell capillaries was developed by Rich Tella, Henrique Martins, Bill Gong, and Frank Lucia of the manufacturing systems and technology department.