Novel portable capillary electrophoretic instrument for analysis of very small samples and its
application in the analysis of exhaled breath condensate.


                            M. Greguš^1,2, F. Foret^1 and P. Kubáň^1,2


^1Bioanalytical Instrumentation, CEITEC Masaryk University, Veveří 97, 602 00, Brno, Czech Republic

      ^2Department of Chemistry, Masaryk University, Kotlářská 2, 611 37 Brno, Czech Republic


                                    E-mail: gregus@mail.muni.cz


Capillary electrophoresis (CE) surpasses others analytical techniques in terms of its high
separation efficiency, short analysis time and low consumption of sample and chemicals. Typical CE
device consists only of a capillary, vessels for BGE with electrodes, detector unit and a high
voltage supply. All these parts can be easily miniaturized. Thus portable CE instruments, P-CE, can
be easily constructed in contrast to other instrumentation, such as HPLC or MS, respectively. There
are many reasons for constructing miniature and portable CE instruments. For instance to reduce
degradation and risk of contamination of the samples during the transport and the storage or to
obtain the results of analysis immediately at the sampling site. One major technical difficulty in
constructing portable CE instruments is the injection part that is either requiring large sample
volumes or uses electrokinetic injection that is not suitable for quantitative analysis. In here we
present a novel P-CE with a special interface for low-volume sampling able to repeatedly analyze
sample volume as low as 20 µL. Moreover, this instrument is constructed for direct sampling of
exhaled breath condensate (EBC) from a miniature sampling device, which was developed in our
laboratory [1]. EBC is formed by cooling and subsequent process of condensation of exhaled breath.
EBC is a promising and interesting liquid sample, which has a potential to be used in clinical
research and diagnosis (especially for different respiratory diseases). To this date, there are
just few articles, where the EBC was analyzed by CE [1-3]. Analysis of EBC obtained by one, single
exhalation is also possible by this instrument. The developed instrument is however not limited
only to EBC, but samples of different origin and amount can be analyzed too. Construction,
technical details and characterization of developed P-CE are discussed.


Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge the financial support from the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (Grant
No. P206/13/21919S). Part of the work was realized in CEITEC - Central European Institute of
Technology with research infrastructure supported by the project CZ.1.05/1.1.00/02.0068 financed
from European Regional Development Fund.


References

[1] M. Greguš, F. Foret and P. Kubáň, Electrophoresis, 36 (2015) 526-533.

[2] P. Kubáň, E-G Kobrin and M. Kaljurand, Journal of Chromatography A, 1267 (2012) 239-245.

[3] M. Greguš, F. Foret, D. Kindlová, E. Pokojová, M. Plutinský, M. Doubková, Z. Merta, I. Binková,
J. Skřičková and P. Kubáň, Journal of Breath Research, 9 (2015) accepted.