Droplet-interfaced microchip and capillary electrophoretic separations.

Both capillary and chip-based electrophoresis are powerful separation methods widely used for the separation of complex analytical mixtures in the fields of genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and cellular analysis. However their utility as basic tools in high-throughput analysis and multidimensional separations has been hampered by inefficient or biased sample injection methods. Herein, we address this problem through the development of a simple separation platform that incorporates droplet-based microfluidic module for the encapsulation of analytes prior to the analytical separation. This method allows for the precise and reproducible injection of pL to nL volume isolated plugs into an electrophoretic separation channel. The developed platform is free from inter sample contamination, allows for small sample size, high-throughput analysis, and can provide quantitative analytical information.