Decoding Complex 2D Separations

Francesco Dondi, Maria C. Pietrogrande, and Nicola Marchetti 

Department of Chemistry, University of Ferrara, 1-44100 Ferrara, Italy 

Department of Analytical Chemistry, University of Pecs, Pecs, Hungary 

Multidimensional Liquid Chromatography Theory and Applications in Industrial Chemistry and the Life Sciences, Edited by Steven A. Cohen and Mark R. Schure. 

The goal of this chapter is to review the recent significant advances achieved in the study of 2D maps (Marchetti et al., 2004 Pietrogrande et al., 2002,2003,2005,2006 a Campostrini et al., 2005). Fundamental aspects concerning the intimate structure of multicomponent mixtures and separations will be discussed in Section 4.2. Description of the methods recently developed by the present authors for characterizing the separation pattern complexity of a 2D multicomponent map will be presented in Sections 4.3 and 4.4. These methods allow one to describe complex 2D separations in terms of SC number (m), the detection of hidden homologous series, spot shape features and separation performance. For these reasons they are named as decoding methods. In Section 4.5, the most recent achievements derived from the application 

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