Capillary electrophoresis coupled to mass spectrometry for biospeciation analysis: critical evaluation

Capillary electrophoresis (CE) finds a growing recognition in simultaneous determination of different chemical species of a given element occurring in biological samples, especially hyphenated with mass-spectrometry (MS) detection. I critically review current capabilities of CE coupled to inductively coupled plasma or electrospray ionization MS in biospeciation analysis. I describe methodological aspects, most advantageous separation and detection strategies, and analytical performance and illustrate these with a selection of real-world applications from recent literature.I focus especially on current shortcomings of CE-MS and give hints about how to rectify these shortcomings in order to make further progress in this field, so that an increasing number of users will perceive CE-MS methods to be routine because they are confident that CE-MS is reliable, versatile and robust.