Miniaturization for the Development of High Performance Separation Systems

Miniaturization is a key technological approach to realize high performance separation systems that have several important features required in modern analytical methods.A smaller scale of the stationary phase synthesis enables a systematic analysis of the retention behavior and also a more efficient development of novel stationary phases in liquid chromatography.Development of microscale sample preparation technique has been regarded as a valuable supporting approach to the development of microscale separation methods.Effective on-line coupling of the microscale sample preparation and separation allows an efficient and rapid analysis without a loss of sensitivity for most of the analytical separations.In this review, development of the miniaturized separation techniques and the applications have been described from the view point of the authors' research group, including the development of novel stationary phase, microscale sample preparation techniques for liquid and gas sample matrices.