In this paper an overview is provided on practical difficulties as well as applications of capillary electrophoresis coupled to laser induced fluorescence detection methods in the field of analysis of biological samples. Various methodological approaches elaborated for determination of small molecules, peptides and proteins are outlined. Besides giving an overview on detection based on native fluorescence, immune and enzyme assays, the main focus is the problematics of sample derivatization and achievable detection sensitivities in the analysis of real biological samples. The characteristics and applicability of the most commonly used labeling reagents are discussed in details.
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