Microcolumn liquid chromatography: Instrumentation, detection and applications

This review discusses many different aspects of microcolumn liquid chromatography (LC) and reflects the areas of microcolumn LC research interest over the past decades. A brief theoretical discussion on a number of major issues, such as column characterisation, chromatographic dilution effects and extracolumn band broadening in microcolumn LC is given. Recent progress in column technology and the demands and developments of instrumentation and accessories for microcolumn LC are also reviewed. Besides that, the developments in a large number of established and also more recent detection techniques for microcolumn LC are also discussed. The potential of hyphenation of microcolumn LC with other techniques, more particularly an multidimensional chromatography and microcolumn LC coupled to mass spectrometry is reviewed. Finally, the perspective of microcolumn LC separation methods is stressed by a number of relevant applications. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.