REPORT
Hamamatsu Hollow Cathode Lamps are now available from major lab suppliers. Hamamatsu single and multi element Hollow Cathode Lamps offer superior stability, spectral purity and output intensity, even for such elements as arsenic and selenium. They are compatible with most commercial spectro photometers, including Beckman, Zeiss and Perkin-Elmer. And best of all, they're available from your local lab supplier.
For Application Information, Call 1-800-524-0504 1-908-231-0960 in New Jersey
HAMAMATSU HAMAMATSU CORPORATION 360 FOOTHILL ROAD P. O. BOX 6910 BRIDGEWATER, NJ 08807 PHONE: 908/231-0960 International Offices in Major Countries of Europe and Asia. β Hamamatsu Corporation, 1990 CIRCLE 60 ON READER SERVICE CARD
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choice for obtaining structural infor mation or for positive identification of an analyte, as in court cases or drug testing in athletes. The good old workhorse of the field, the UV-vis detector, will continue to hold its place of honor for routine anal yses of compounds containing a UV chromophore. Its ruggedness, reliabil ity, ease of operation, and reproducibil ity make this detector desirable for lab oratories where the ultimate in sensi tivity is not necessary. In our laboratory, the UV-vis detectors pur chased in the early 1970s have been used by a large number of graduate stu dents and are still giving good results. Multiple detectors will also play a major role in HPLC. Two or more de tectors will be used either in series or via stream splitting. It can be helpful to have a universal detector determine the number of solutes present in the effluent and one or more very selective detectors identify the compounds. The primary constraint is that the solvent system must be compatible with all de tection systems. Computer optimization is here to stay even though some people are still reluctant to use these programs. As the younger chemists become more com puter literate, resistance will diminish and a tremendous amount of time will be saved by computer optimization. The use of robots will also increase exponentially in the next decade. Ro bots will be used for all routine tasks and will be especially necessary in sam ple preparation and handling of poten tially dangerous samples, such as phys iological fluids from AIDS patients, other viral and bacterial materials, contaminated environmental samples, and radioisotopes. Robotics will im prove laboratory safety and will help to fill the gap due to the diminishing pool of science graduates available for jobs in industry and académie. In addition, the use of robots can increase the number of samples reliably and efficiently processed per day, which is clearly an advantage in high-volume analytical laboratories (61). Control programs that use artificial intelligence will be the next step in robotics. In the future, multitasking instruments will be commonplace. For example, after preliminary sample preparation by specialized robots, several instruments will be interfaced so that all the steps from rigorous sample preparation to separation, peak identification, structure determination, and quantitation will be done automatically. Not only will the instrument have several columns and/or detectors, but it will be interfaced with CE, GC, or MS. This combination of instruments
ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 62, NO. 19, OCTOBER 1, 1990
and techniques (62) is often referred to as multidimensional chromatography. In protein analysis, peptide mapping may be included in the multitasking program as will the determination of the base sequence in nucleic acids in genome investigations. HPLC, alone or in combination with one or more techniques, will continue to be the separations technique that is the backbone of the analytical laboratory, especially in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, because of the ease of sample preparation, automation, speed, and sensitivity. In the future, fast HPLC may be used instead of flow injection analysis to monitor real-time fermentation processes that are used in biotechnology. Although the dominant applications will be in the life sciences, HPLC will face new challenges in environmental testing and in forensic medicine. Better separation techniques are also needed in the chemical industry for the manufacture of adhesives, sealants, catalysts for petroleum processing, and materials used in the manufacture of microcircuits. Good preparative and process HPLC techniques are required to separate, isolate, and purify most consumer products such as food, drugs, vitamins, and cosmetics. Several separation techniques will be competitive with HPLC in the next decade: CE, SFC, countercurrent chromatography (CCC), and field-flow fractionation (FFF). However, I do not believe that these techniques will replace HPLC. Because of its ruggedness, versatility, and separating power—especially for water-soluble, nonvolatile, thermally labile compounds—HPLC will maintain its solid position. Although CE is a strong competitor in the separation of large biopolymers and biologically active molecules, more research is needed in injection systems, detectors, and peak identification before it can achieve its full potential. HPLC will be used for routine analysis for molecules with molecular weights in the range of 200 to several thousand. GC will continue to be the method of choice for thermally stable, volatile molecules that have a molecular weight below 200, whereas CE will be the method of choice for biopolymers. SFC will be the preferred preparative technique if more mobile phases are found in which analytes are soluble. A major advantage of this technique is the ease of removing the solvent from the product solution. CCC is also useful for preparative work and has been used recently in the purification of peptides and proteins (63). However, many researchers prefer HPLC because they are able to scale up their analytical sep-
