The overall goal of the project is to develop the instrumentation and methodology of high sensitive and fast analyses of biologically important molecules. The main effort will be focused on the development of methods for prenatal diagnostics and populati on screening, based on mutation detection in genomic DNA. Our latest experiments show that the prerequisites of sensitivity and analysis speed enhancements are the application of laser spectroscopy as a detection principle and miniaturization of the sepa ration device. An electrophoretic separation of DNA fragments detected by laser induced fluorescence can be accomplished in short capillaries or on chips without a loss of resolution. Thus, the analysis time of length and conformational polymorphism of D NA can be shortened to several tens of seconds and a sequence read length of 400 nucleotides can be attained in few minutes. The submitted project includes three research areas of analytical instrumentation and methodology: l. Mutation detection in ATPas