Determination of bioactive constituents in traditional Chinese medicines by CE with electrochemical detection.

This paper reviews the recent advances and the key strategies in capillary electrophoresis (CE) with electrochemical detection (ECD) for separating and detecting a variety of bioactive constituents in traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs). The subjects covered include the separation modes for the CE analysis of the constituents in TCMs, the CE-ECD system, the sample preparations of TCMs, the ECD of TCMs, the applications of CE-ECD in the determination of various bioactive constituents in Chinese medicinal materials and their preparations, the identification and differentiation of TCMs by CE-ECD, and future prospects. It is expected that CE-ECD will become a powerful tool in the herbal medicinal fields and will lead to the creation of truly routine devices for TCM analysis.