title: Toward million-fold sensitivity enhancement by sweeping in capillary electrophoresis combined with thermal lens microscopic detection using an interface chip.
abstract: This paper reports a thermal lens microscope (TLM) detection coupled with capillary electrophoresis (CE) by using an interface chip (IFChip) to achieve highly sensitive detection with high reproducibility. Fused silica capillaries with an inner diameter of 50 microm were directly connected to a microchannel on the IFChip. In comparison with an on-capillary detection method in CE-TLM, ca. 10-fold improvements in the reproducibility for peak height were obtained by using IFChips. The detection limit of an azo dye was estimated to be 3.6 x 10(-7)M (100 ppb), which was above 100-times lower than that of conventional absorbance detection. Toward further improvement of the detectability for nonfluorescent compounds, on-line sample preconcentration by sweeping was applied to the CE-TLM using the IFChip. Due to the sweeping effect, 3900000-fold increase in the sensitivity was successfully achieved.
authors.affiliation: Department of Material Chemistry, Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University, Katsura, Kyoto 615-8510, Japan. fkitagawa@mbox.kudpc.kyoto-u.ac.jp
authors.forename: Fumihiko
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Kitagawa
authors.forename: Takashi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Tsuneka
authors.forename: Yoshihiro
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Akimoto
authors.forename: Kenji
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Sueyoshi
authors.forename: Kenji
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Uchiyama
authors.forename: Akihiko
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hattori
authors.forename: Koji
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Otsuka
mesh_terms: D019075:Electrophoresis, Capillary / Q000379:methods*; D008853:Microscopy / Q000379:methods*; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity