Electroextraction

[5] Johann Stichlmair developed electroextraction at the University of Essen in Germany in 1987 as an improvement on liquid-liquid extraction in an electric field.

[2] Electroextraction has also influenced the development of similar electrophoretic separation techniques involving a membrane between the two-phase systems.

[3] EE is ideal for pharmaceuticals with low concentrations of active ingredient, such as those containing proteins and peptides, because of its ability to lower limits of detection for liquid chromatography and capillary electrophoresis.

[9] In addition, sample enrichment by EE helps overcome the low injection volumes and short optical path length of UV-Vis detectors that accompany CE.

Antisense oligonucleotides inhibit protein expression from their complementary base pair sequence and can treat certain diseases and genetic disorders.

[10] EE coupled to liquid chromatography also successfully detects low concentration metabolites in urine for the purpose of studying metabolic processes.

Electroextraction is better suited over other techniques for its ability to extract small amounts of dye from very dilute solutions.

This separation was done using an aqueous two-phase system of dextran-polyethylene glycol-water to stabilize the amino acids.

Figure 1. A diagram of the electroextraction process. Particles cross the phase barrier while any convective mixing is constrained to each phase
Figure 2. A diagram of an electroextraction apparatus
Figure 3. A diagram of a capillary electroextraction apparatus