Food Analysis on Electrophoretic Microchips

One of the current trends of separation techniques in analytical chemistry is miniaturization. The aim of miniaturization is to attain better performance, shorter analysis time, and reduced reagent consumption. Capillary Electrophoresis (CE) microchips, the first generation of micro-total analysis systems, are the most used microsystems in food analysis. The scope of this review is to gather and discuss the different applications of such miniaturized devices in this field. Various analytes of food significance such as natural antioxidants, amino acids, proteins, dyes, vanilla flavors, DNA probes, heavy metals, toxins, allergens etc. have been successfully monitored using CE-microchips, either to assess food quality or to ensure food safety. Also, to deal with the high complexity of food matrices, the integration of sample preparation steps onto the chip and the use of new tools from nanotechnology for the detection step have been reported.