2D-LC Has Arrived

In the last two years, I haven’t seen any earth-shattering changes in LC separations. However, I have noticed an increasing willingness to embrace comprehensive two-dimensional liquid chromatography for separations of complex mixtures. Comprehensive 2D-LC has been around for almost 30 years, of course, but I wondered at one time whether it would ever catch on.

In the last two years, I haven’t seen any earth-shattering changes in LC separations. However, I have noticed an increasing willingness to embrace comprehensive two-dimensional liquid chromatography for separations of complex mixtures. Comprehensive 2D-LC has been around for almost 30 years, of course, but I wondered at one time whether it would ever catch on. People seemed to try it from time-to-time but couldn’t stick with it, perhaps because of a perception that it was too slow or the lack of commercial equipment. But over the past decade a change has occurred. The development of commercial instrumentation designed for 2D-LC has been critical to making this technique feasible and more popular. This effort has been led most notably by Peter Carr, Dwight Stoll, Peter Schoenmakers, Luigi Mondello and Paola Dugo, although many others have also been involved. In fact, new demonstrations of its capabilities appear almost weekly. It appears 2D-LC has finally arrived as the viable and powerful separation technique that many knew it could and should be.