ABSTRACT
Gas chromatography although depending on the same basic separation principles, is characterized by continuous detection of the components eluting from the column, and the chromatogram is the recorded trace rather than the paper or the thin-layer plat. The advantage of gas chromatography is that gases emerging from the column can be monitored with great sensitivity using a variety of universal and specific detectors. Although many laboratories in the early days of gas chromatography prepared and packed their own supports, this practice is now virtually extinct, with the commercial availability of highly efficient, highly reproducible, and highly reliable packing materials and packed columns. In many of the published descriptions of gas chromatography using mass spectrometric detection the specificity of the detector is being utilized rather than its potential for detecting very small amounts of analyte. More relevant to the specific topic of gas chromatography are methods utilizing chirally active stationary phases.
