Book excerpt: In Clinical Applications of Capillary Electrophoresis, Stephen Palfrey brings together for first time a collection of detailed capillary electrophoresis protocols designed exclusively for clinical applications. Written by the leading scientists who have often perfected these methods in their own laboratories, the protocols furnish new and more powerful assays for many routine serum and blood tests now regularly performed in clinical laboratories, including urine protein analysis, hemoglobin separation, and the detection of CSF proteins, lipoproteins, myoglobin, cryoglobulins, HbA1c, and cathepsin. The protocols offered for DNA studies include double-stranded DNA analysis, the prenatal diagnosis of Down's syndrome, Rh D/d genotyping, the identification of mutated p53 oncogene, and the detection of microsatellite instability in cancers. Many of the methods can be automated to replace the more costly and labor-intensive tests that are currently used in most clinical laboratories. Clinical Applications of Capillary Electrophoresis demonstrates clearly the simplicity, versatility, and power of CE over conventional methods. It offers to beginning clinical investigators, as well as established laboratories new to the technique, a representative range of highly practical CE methods-assays that are not only certain to become ever more productive, but are already eminently useful today.