Abstract
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of multi-capillary electrophoresis instrument in clinical laboratory. An automated clinical capillary electrophoresis system was evaluated for performing serum proteins electrophoresis and immuno-fixation electrophoresis by subtraction. In this study the performance of capillary electrophoresis was compared with the cellulose acetate membrane electrophoresis and agarose gel immunofixation electrophoresis for serum proteins. The results of capillary electrophoresis and cellulose acetate membrane electrophoresis were good (r=0.89∼0.97) for protein fractions and A/G ratio except for β-gobulin fraction (r=0.60). Both within-run and day to day precisions (CVs) of assay results for 5 main fractions and A/G ratio (n=10) were between 0.3∼6.3%. The reference ranges of serum protein fractions obtained from 200 healthy individuals by cellulose acetate membrane electrophoresis were almost equal to that of capillary electrophoresis except for α-1 globulin fraction. No significant difference of electropherograms between cellulose acetate electrophoresis and capillary electrophoresis was observed in the abnormal serum such as presence of bilirubin (<20mg/dl), hemoglobin (<300 mg/dl), lipid (Intralipos <1%) and samples from patients with acute phase response, liver injury, polyclonal hyper gammaglobulinemia or M-proteinemia. The method of capillary immuno-fixation electrophoresis by subtraction showed good agreement with agarose gel immunofixation electrophoresis by subtraction identifying 30 monoclonal gammmopathy patient samples.