Intra- and interinstrument reproducibility of migration parameters in capillary electrophoresis for substance identification in systematic toxicological analysis.

The intra- and interinstrument reproducibilities of four capillary electrophoresis instruments were studied for identification purposes in systematic toxicological analysis (STA). A test set of 20 acidic test compounds and 5 reference compounds were analyzed for five days on each instrument using capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) and micellar electrokinetic chromatography (MEKC). The buffers consisted of 90 mM borate set at pH 8.4 (CZE) and 20 mM phosphate and 50 mM sodium dodecyl sulfate set at pH 7.5 (MEKC). All analyses were carried out using fused silica capillaries at an electric field strength of 52.6 kV/m. The use of a reproducible identification parameter is very important in STA. To deal with the poor reproducibility of the migration time, we recently introduced the corrected effective mobility. In this study, we investigated the intra- and interinstrument reproducibility of the migration time, the effective mobility, and the corrected effective mobility. Large differences in intra-instrument reproducibility were found when the migration time was used. The calculation of the effective mobility and the corrected effective mobility diminished these differences and enhanced the interinstrument reproducibility roughly by a factor 3. For (corrected) effective mobilities, intrainstrument reproducibilities were between 0.8-2.6% and interinstrument reproducibilities were between 3.2-3.9%.