Thanks to one of the readers of this blog – Farooq, I now have the full text of an excellent, 21-page review by the researches from Rome and Spain entitled “Recent applications in nanoliquid chromatography” (DOI 10.1002/jssc.200700061).

Two months ago, I did a small article about nano liquid chromatography to answer a question posted on Yahoo Answers but after reading “Recent applications in nanoliquid chromatography” I wanted to revisit the topic in more depth, so I think I am going to make this post into a series – “Nano Liquid Chromatography”

Introduction

“Nano” has recently become a very trendy word in science and technology and most of us think of nanotechnology as something very modern and new, so it is hard to imagine that nano HPLC method emerged almost 20 years ago.

In 1988 Karl Karlsson and Milos Novotny published a paper “Separation efficiency of slurry-packed liquid chromatography microcolumns with very small inner diameters” (DOI 10.1021/ac00168a006) where they reported extremely high efficiencies with micro LC columns that had the inner diameter (ID) of 44 micrometers.

Since that time great efforts have been made to miniaturize LC instrumentation by carrying out theoretical, technological, and methodological studies. Presently nano-liquid chromatography is widely used as a complementary separation technique to conventional LC, providing a great number of important applications especially in proteomics.