Electrophoresis of serum proteins:: comparison of capillary zone electrophoresis Capillarys® (Sebia) and agarose gel electrophoresis Hydrasys® (Sebia)

Since several years, serum proteins electrophoresis became a routine analysis, mainly performed by agarose gel electrophoresis, frequently semi-automated. We compared the new fully automated capillary electrophoresis system from Sebia, Capillarys((R)), with our reference method, agarose gel electrophoresis Hydrasys((R)) (Sebia). This study focused on the evaluation of both the analytical performances and some practical aspects such as ease of use, rapidity, costs. It appears clearly from that study that both methods give similar results for the detection of monoclonal proteins. We notice that the capillary electrophoresis (Capillarys((R))) displays higher sensitivity (97.2%) than the agarose gel electrophoresis Hydrasys((R)) (93.5%), however with a lower specificity (93.7 versus 98.9%). On the other hand, the Capillarys((R)) method displays obvious practical advantages such as full automation, ease of use and rapidity.