Frontal analysis capillary electrophoresis: recent advances and future perspectives

The developments on frontal analysis capillary electrophoresis (FACE) from 2012 to 2017 to study interactions of simple and complex systems are reviewed. Most research papers focused on therapeutic drug-related studies; however, other studies include chemical sensing, drug delivery, inhibitor screening and capillary coating. New ligand-substrate systems such as template-molecularly imprinted polymer systems were reported. Comparison of FACE with other analytical techniques used to investigate binding interaction, and the determination of binding parameters using different isotherm models are also covered. In 2017, eight research papers were reported including new detection by ESI-MS. Future research direction of FACE may include high sensitivity detection and throughput screening of drugs, natural products and biomarkers for clinical diagnosis.