Electrophoresis with Polarized Fluorescence Detection. Application to Capillary Fluorescence Rejection

Abstract

In this paper, we integrate the apparatus of electrophoresis with polarized fluorescence detection to suppress the background fluorescence arising from illuminating the coating layer of channel containers with a laser excitation source. It has demonstrated moderate background suppression efficiency, close to the ideal 3‐fold reduction on the surface doped with randomly distributed static fluorophores. In addition, when the fluorescence coverage is coated along the same orientation more uniformly, the background reduction is 10‐fold in our experiments. This detection scheme is applicable to acquire the electrophoregrams of separating small organic molecules and biopolymers, such as nucleic acids, when the loading of staining dyes is not heavy. This apparatus is simple. Only adding a pair of polarizer optics is needed. This detection scheme should work equally well with an incoherent light source.