Future Trends
HPLC will continue to be one of the most important laboratory separation
techniques for analytical and preparative purposes. Biotechnology and the
life sciences is where HPLC will be a crucial procedure. Biotechnology
companies will use HPLC to continue to prove to the government that their
products are nontoxic, pure, and active. Fast and microbore columns will
be important in the analytical and mass-scale preparative applications
for biologicals and heterologously expressed gene products. Affinity and
immunoaffinity techniques will be utilized more frequently for the production
of biotechnological pharmaceuticals because of the need for ultrapurification
in order to remove all unwanted material from the host cell. HPLC will
continue to be the mainstay in purification and separation of proteins,
peptides, and nucleotides. Smaller analytical columns will be needed to
map the human genome. The need for more accurate and higher capacity chiral
separation columns will be needed by the pharmaceutical companies in order
to optimize efficiency in mass-production of "active" enantiomeric compounds.Specialization
in detection and identification methods will increase in importance. This
would involve the monitoring of environmental pollutants, using special
chelate packing to detect metal contaminants in water, developing fast
separations to monitor fermentation, and developing rapid methods in the
identification of viruses and bacteria. HPLC-MS will be important in forensic
medicine and athletic governing boards. Use of HPLC-MS will allow certain
analyses and evidence to stand up in court. HPLC alone or in combination
with other methods can monitor for drugs in athletes.Silica was the resin/support
of the 1980's; possibly, organic resins will take flight in years to come
since they are unreactive, they operate at a wide range of pH's, reproducibility
is favorable, they can be stereoselective, and they can be used with SEC (Knox,
1989).Polytyptic chromatography will increase in popularity as should
lasers because of their increased selectivity and sensitivity. The light-
scattering detectors may well replace the RI detectors in the future. Multiple
detectors per system is a possiblity and computer-generated optimization
of HPLC conditions will increase and keep pace with the computer literacy
movement. Use of robots may be near; one important function could be to
handle and load hazardous sample such as AIDS samples, viral/bacterial
samples, radioisotopes, or environmental contaminants. All information
in this section, with the one referenced exception, mostly reflects the
information and opinion received from the following article: Brown,
P.R. Analytical Chemistry, 1990, Vol. 62, pp. 995-1008. Knox,
J.H. and Kauer, B.; High Performance Liquid Chromatography; Brown.
P.R. and Hartwick, R.A. Eds.; Wiley Interscience: New York, 1989, Chapter
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