Instrumental Developments

Abstract

In the first years of the development of CE as a separation method, research groups had to build their own instruments. Since the basic equipment for CE can be quite simple, this was not a major problem. Even now, homemade instruments are used not only in academic groups but also occasionally in industrial laboratories [1]. For routine use, however, such devices are often not ideal, with an insufficient repeatability of the sample injection process as the main problem. Since 1986 a number of instrument manufacturers have stepped into the CE market. Apparently, the sales have not been up to expectation so far, and a few companies have already quit or have reduced their efforts and investments in CE. Some suppliers limit themselves to a specific application area. Waters for instance promotes its CE instrument as a Capillary Ion Analyzer (CIA), and the ABI PRISM® 310 and 3700 instruments are sold (by PE Biosystems) as Genetic Analyzers. Of course, there is nothing against using these instruments in other type of applications. Still, a number of suppliers offer general-purpose CE instruments; at present (end of 1999) in Europe these companies are Agilent (formerly known as the Hewlett Packard Chemical Analysis Group), Beckman Coulter, Bio-Rad Laboratories, Thermo BioAnalysis and Helena, which sells instruments produced by Prince Technologies.