Metabolic fingerprinting with capillary electrophoresis.

Increasingly biomedical studies require a top-down approach that can be achieved by comparing patterns, signatures or "fingerprints" of metabolites that change in response to disease, toxin exposure, environmental or genetic alterations. Capillary electrophoresis is a technique well suited for the analysis of biofluids and extracted tissue. The experimental design requires a multidisciplinary team comprising chemists, informaticians, medics, etc. Here we have reviewed the field of CE fingerprinting and organised the manuscript in four main blocks, Sample treatment is a discussion of the latest methods for extraction of compounds, Analytical methods, deals with the different versions of electrophoretic methods and detection instrumentation, Chemometrics and CE fingerprinting, explains algorithms that have been presented for peak alignment, normalization, data analysis and metabolite identification, and the Applications heading focuses in urine, plasma, organic matter and plant extract studies.