Cyclodextrins as Chiral Selectors in Capillary Electrophoresis—Recent Developments in Understanding Analyte Complexation and Applications in Pharmaceutical Analysis

CDs, cyclic oligosaccharides consisting of α-1,4 linked d-glucopyranose units, have been applied in many areas, such as food, cosmetics, environmental, agriculture, textile, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries, due to their ability to form guest-host complexes. Because CDs are chiral compounds, they have also been successfully used as chiral selectors in analytical enantioseparation techniques, especially CE. In the last decades, multidisciplinary approaches have been performed, combining CE with NMR spectroscopy, molecular modeling, and other techniques in order to understand aspects of chiral recognition underlying enantioseparations. The present review focuses on such mechanistic studies published between January 2023 and March 2026 in addition to the application of CD-mediated CE enantioseparations to the determination of the enantiomeric purity of drug substances as well as the analysis of pharmaceutical formulations.