ABSTRACT
The drive to resolve and characterize samples of ever increasing complexity motivates the development and use of higher-throughput, more reproducible and sensitive analytical techniques. Chromatographic techniques such as capillary electrophoresis (CE), gas chromatography (GC), and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) all have contributed to the continued evolution of separation methods for complex mixture analysis. More often than not, these separation techniques are coupled to a mass spectrometer for the sensitive quantitation and/or identification of chemical species of interest. In these cases, separation occurs pre-ionization in a time scale ranging from minutes to hours, which may lead to a throughput bottleneck. Speeding up the pre-ionization separation can result in loss of temporal separation of the eluted compounds. Conversely, increasing complexity of the mixture under study forces the analyst to choose separation or mass analysis approaches with higher peak capacities. In most scenarios, this choice is accompanied by an increase in the initial acquisition cost of the necessary instrumentation.
