Structure-retention correlation in liquid chromatography for pharmaceutical applications

This review covers the most important aspects, focused on an actual topic in fundamental chromatographic research, which attempts to correlate the retentions of analytes in liquid chromatography with their structures, using various molecular descriptors/properties (hydrophobicity given by octanol/water partition coefficient, acidity/basicity constants, dipole moment, polarity parameters, molecular volume, and solubility). Some of these correlations are, however, based on retention mechanisms which are supposed to describe, thoroughly, the chromatographic process, such as the linear solvation energy relationship.