Dear Colleagues,

Amino acids (AAs) are essential building bricks of proteins and are encoded by RNAt. The 20 usual AAs are well known and differ from each other by the nature of the side chain. L-AAs are widely found in living organisms, but the interest in D-AAs has become more important for biologists in recent years. Modified AAs are also present in biological media, resulting from a post-transcriptional modification or a different metabolic pathway (methylation, hydroxylation, acetylation, etc.) or a metabolization (decarboxylation, demethylation, dehydration, etc.). The knowledge of their concentrations in vivo is important to understand their metabolism or catabolism in relation with a specific pathology, for their biological implications and for medical diagnosis.

Several analytical techniques allow the detection and quantification of AAs, but capillary electrophoresis (CE) presents the main advantages of being highly sensitive and not expensive, allowing enantiomeric separation with high resolution. Thus, CE is a technique of choice for AA’s analysis and is successfully applied in several application domains and contexts.

This Special Issue will cover the most important evolutions in CE analysis during the last few years. It will focus on the analysis of amino acids by CE coupled to conductivity, fluorescence or mass spectrometry, from analytical development to biomedical applications.

Subtopics include, but are not limited to:

• CE development and coupling with MS for the analysis of amino acids;
• Specific detection of D-amino acids by CE;
• CE/conductimetry and CE/fluorescence for amino acids analysis;
• CE for biomedical applications.

Prof. Dr. François Couderc
Prof. Dr. Fabrice Collin
Prof. Dr. Petr Tuma
Guest Editors

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• amino acids
• capillary electrophoresis
• enantiomeric separation
• CE/MS