CHAPTER 8: CE-MS for Metabolomics: A Comparison with Other Techniques

Most primary and secondary metabolites are water soluble and ionic and, for this reason, capillary electrophoresis (CE) coupled to mass spectrometry (MS) provides a very effective analytical tool for global metabolic profiling, also termed metabolomics. Numbers very often do not support this idea, but this is principally because when lipids, which are mainly detected with liquid chromatography (LC) coupled to MS, are included in the metabolome, they outnumber all the rest of the compounds and comparisons are not accurate. In this chapter, the general metabolomics workflow will be followed and at every step, the strengths and weakness of CE-MS compared with other analytical platforms based on MS will be discussed.