ABSTRACT
In general, optimizations are very important in both an industrial and a scientific context, since they can significantly improve any process/system not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. Life cannot be imagined without optimization because one is dealing daily with many processes that must be optimized to reach given goals. In chromatography, the separation between given or all compounds of a mixture needs to be optimized, for instance, in drug impurity profiling or chromatographic fingerprinting. A genetic algorithm was employed to optimize the buffer system of micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatography (MEKC) to separate the active components in a Chinese herbal medicine. One of the most critical steps in multivariate calibration applications, including those in separation science, is variable selection. The reason is that chromatographic techniques generate chromatograms with hundreds or thousands of variables, of which not all are informative, but make it more difficult to model and interpret.
