Capillary Electrophoresis with Detection by Laser-Induced Fluorescence

The importance of capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) has been increasing in use for: structural analysis of plant cell walls, characterization of enzymes that degrade polysaccharides, and profiling of oligosaccharides to characterize cell wall mutants. CZE with laser-induced fluorescence detection provides high separation efficiencies, high speed analysis, with extremely small sample requirements. Here, we describe the instrumentation we use and the methods for attaching fluorescent labels to oligosaccharides so that they can be detected.