Development Of Capillary Array Electrophoresis System With Confocal Fluorescence Rotary Scanner And Study Of Its Applications

A new capillary array electrophoresis(CAE) using confocal fluorescence rotary scanner was set up and applied for the high throughput screening of combinatorial chemistry.We have constructed a rotary CAE scanner containing rotary encoder and high speed DC motor based on laser induced fluorescence(LIF) detection. This CAE scanner system can accurately orient the position of each capillary and measure the fluorescence data from the being scanned capillary, according the position (angular) trigger signal output from the rotary encoder. The total maximum number of the capillaries is determined by the resolution of the rotary encoder, and the higher sampling rate for capillary electrophoresis is decided by the motor speed. The high throughput characteristic makes this setup promising applications in analytical field. Separation of the enantiomers of several amino acids in current 16-channel CAE with different additives in different channels is demonstrated in this report. The one-to-one relationship between the fluorescence signal and each capillary is well established in this capillary array electrophoresis system. Our initial experiments also demonstrate the instrument potential application in selection and optimization of separation conditions for the...