Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

The need to identify and quantify chemicals pervades almost every segment of modern society. Whether one is trying to protect the environment, optimizing manufacturing, monitoring Olympic athletes for drug use, or checking the quality of modern biopharmaceuticals, it is necessary to separate and detect the individual chemicals. Capillary electrophoresis has arisen as one of the premiere methods for separating chemicals, offering 10-100 times the separation power of conventional methods coupled with low operating costs. However while powerful, the technique of capillary electrophoresis can fail to detection or determine some types of sample, particularly biopharmaceuticals. Our research improves the performance of capillary electrophoresis particularly for the analysis of proteins. Our approach makes the instrument biologically silent by coating key components with essentially a cell membrane.