Application of capillary electrophoresis for dried blood spots analysis

Blood samples are normally analyzed in the form of plasma or serum. As an alternative for blood sampling and storage, dry blood spots (DBS) have been increasingly used in recent years. In the actual dissertation thesis, DBS are processed and analyzed by capillary electrophoresis (CE), which has been very rarely used for DBS analysis in the past. However, CE offers several features, given by the recent development of this technique, not available for standard analytical methods. Direct coupling of microextraction techniques to CE and simultaneous determination of analytes present in complex matrices leads to minimization or elimination of deficiencies in DBS analysis, for example the effect of sample matrix, hematocrit effect, and inhomogeneous distribution of analytes in DBS. In the simplest possible arrangement, sample treatment, injection, and analysis of DBS samples are achieved exclusively by a single commercial CE instrument. Application of newly developed fully soluble materials for DBS sampling offers better extraction efficiency and more accurate quantitation. The developed concepts include new methods for efficient treatment of DBS samples and their direct analysis without the need for operator intervention and they provide sufficient selectivity and sensitivity for the determination of important analytes not only in DBSs but also in other complex samples