History, advancement, bottlenecks, and future of chiral capillary electrochromatography

•History of chiral capillary electrochromatography.•Mechanisms of electroosmotic flow generation.•Chiral selectors used in capillary electrochromatography.•Current difficulties and future trends in chiral capillary electrochromatography. Capillary electrochromatography (CEC) represents a technique with less than 30 years of intense development and in this period this technique has seen huge promise, fast development, stagnation, and significant decline of innovative activity. The major goal of the present overview is not to present an extensive review of the literature on chiral CEC but to analyze the reasons for this dramatic development and attempting to answer questions such as: 1) Was the potential of CEC reasonably evaluated in 1990s before starting the explosive development in this field? 2) Did the development of this technique take the right track? 3) What other developments and competitive trends led to stagnation in the advancement of CEC? 4) Why is the activity in this field currently decreasing? 5) What are the current challenges and promises and what is the future of chiral CEC?