Books
Sweet Separations •bohyàraîe analyste
Carbohydrate Analysis: High Performance Liquid Chromatography and Capillary Electrophoresis Ziad El Rassi, Ed. Elsevier Science Publishers 655 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10010 1995, 692 pp., $265.75
This book will be very useful for anyone in terested in carbohydrate analysis, espe cially researchers and technicians in bio technology, medical research, biochemis try, and the pharmaceutical and foods industries. The objective of the book is to provide a comprehensive review of carbo hydrate analysis by HPLC and CE and to cover separation methods for all classes of carbohydrates. The first section of the book, which deals with the solute, reviews current methods of sample preparation for analy sis by HPLC and CE. Purification of vari ous types of carbohydrates, release of the carbohydrate from the sample, and fur ther degradation of polysaccharides by chemical and enzymatic methods are dis cussed. This is an excellent section; sam ple handling, which can be the most timeconsuming step in an analysis, is too often neglected or ignored in reviews and books. The second part of the book, dealing with analytical and preparative separa tions, describes the details of various modes of chromatography used in HPLC analysis of carbohydrates and glycoconjugates. The coverage in this section is somewhat uneven. The longest chapter on HPLC modes is about reversed-phase
and hydrophobic interaction, which is ap propriate because these modes are used most widely. On the other hand, affinity chromatography is covered in less depth in Chapter 6, and the discussion appears to be limited mainly to the author's own work. Chapter 8 is an excellent review of CE of carbohydrates and glycosylated compounds. It includes the fundamen tals of CE, CE modes, the electrophoretic system, and methodologies and applica tions. The last chapter in this section pre sents a review of semipreparative and pre parative HPLC methods for the isolation of carbohydrates. Detection of carbohydrates is dis cussed in the third section. Carbohydrates generally do not have UV-absorbing chromophores; therefore, low concentrations are not readily detected and the choice of an appropriate detection method is an im portant part of a carbohydrate analysis. These problems as well as the potential value of various detection methods are discussed in a thorough review. These chapters can be most helpful not only to those doing research on carbohydrates but also to researchers working with nonglycosylated compounds that do not contain a chromophore. They describe electrochemical refractive index, mass spectrometry, chiroptical and evaporative light scattering detectors as well as preand postcolumn derivatization, postcolumn enzyme reactors, and direct and in direct UV and fluorescence methods. The coverage is also uneven in this section, with short chapters on refractive index and chiroptical detectors. The references in these chapters are limited, and the review on chiroptical detectors is general and not oriented toward carbohydrates. On the other hand, the chapter on mass spec trometry is comprehensive and focuses on carbohydrate analysis. The editor, a well-known authority on carbohydrate and glycoconjugate analysis, has done an excellent job of organizing the book. There is little overlap in the ma terial, and the chapters are organized
718 A Analytical Chemistry, December 1, 1995
uniformly so that information is readily available from the table of contents or the index. For the most part, the chapters are well written and as uniform as a vol ume with contributed chapters can be. There is no author index, but there is a good subject index. The references in al most all the articles include 1993 refer ences, which are as recent as can be ex pected in a book of reviews published in 1995. This is an excellent book, and I recom mend it for everyone who deals with carbo hydrates and either wants an understand ing of the fundamentals of HPLC or CE analyses or needs practical information on the separation and quantitation of all classes of carbohydrates and glycosylated compounds. Reviewed by Phyllis R. Brown, Univer sity of Rhode Island
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Modern Practice of Gas Chromatography, 3rd ed. Robert L. Grab, Ed. John Wiley & Sons 605 Third Ave. New York, NY 10158 1995, 888 pp., $89.95
This text includes contributions from a number of authors, some of whom are new to this edition. As with the previous edi tions, the intent of this book is to present a fairly comprehensive view of GC using contributors who are specialists in the areas of GC they describe.
