Capillary Electrochromatography for Chiral Separations: A Focus on Pharmaceutical, Agrochemical, and Biochemistry Applications and Recently Used Chiral Stationary Phases

The separation of chiral compounds is a challenging issue in various fields, e.g., biochemistry, the pharmaceutical industry, food chemistry, forensics, agriculture, etc. Very often, one of the two enantiomers can exhibit different activity. Therefore, the separation and analysis of enantiomers requires analytical methods for, e.g., quality control, pharmacokinetic studies, etc. Their separation is usually performed by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), gas chromatography, supercritical fluid chromatography and microfluidic techniques such as capillary electrophoresis (CE), nano-liquid chromatography, and capillary electrochromatography (CEC). CEC is a modern analytical technique that combines the features of HPLC and CE (high selectivity and high chromatographic efficiency, respectively). The enantiomers are moved to the detector by an electroosmotic flow generated by the application of high voltage. In this review, the main features of CEC, and the basic principles of enantiomer separation are briefly summarized. Selected applications (appearing 2023–2026 February) employing packed capillaries, and monolithic and open tubular columns, are presented and discussed.