Research and Application Progress of Micellar Electrokinetic Chromatography in Separation of Proteins

Micellar electrokinetic chromatography (MEKC) is a hybrid of chromatography and electrophoresis. The separation mechanism is based on the interaction of analytes and pseudo-stationary phase and also the differential mobility in the electric field. Such property of MEKC can be made good use for separation of proteins and peptides, which have high dimensionality. In the past years, either in the form of single dimensional or multi-dimensional separations, MEKC has demonstrated its excellent usability in biomolecule separations. Recently, as the development in CE-MS was revisited, there are also new developments in MEKC-MS hyphenation techniques, which further points to the usefulness of MEKC in analysis of proteins and peptides. In this article, the recent advances of MEKC applied in separation and analysis of proteins were reviewed and the prospect of this technique was anticipated.