Hyphenation future trends

The future technological advances in drug discovery will likely involve separation sciences, MS, and hyphenated techniques. More detailed discussions on the technology development and future trends in bioanalysis, laboratory automation, and MS instrumentation have been elaborated in other chapters. Therefore, only three technologies are specifically addressed with regard to their potential application in drug discovery pSFC monolithic column technologies and chip-based separations. 

FIA and, in particular, computer-controlled derived techniques still have an important contribution to make to quality control aspects in food analysis. Future trends will accompany the changes observed in analytical laboratories, where mass spectrometry-based detectors are replacing molecular spectrophotometry (e.g., diode array detectors [DAD]). Hence, it is expected the hyphenation of flow injection techniques to mass spectrometry, particularly for sample treatment (extraction, sample matrix removal) using FIA. Other less exploited feature, designated as reversed FIA (Mansour and Danielson, 2012), may also have an important role in future years. In this case, sample is applied as carrier, which allows an enhancement of detection limits. The only constraints are possible sample scarcity or high cost and multiplication of artifacts due to interferences. The future application of FIA is left to the imagination and ingenuity of future food analysts. 

Trends in mass spectrometry focus on the improvement of instrumentation, of several techniques in order to minimize sample volume, to improve sensitivity and to reduce detection limits. This is combined with increasing the speed of several analyses, with automation of analytical procedures and subsequently reducing the price of analysis. A minimizing of sample volumes means a reduction of waste volume with the aim of developing green chemistry . Furthermore, new analytical techniques involve a development of quantification procedures to improve the accuracy and precision of analytical data. Special attention in future will be given to the development of hyphenated mass spectrometric techniques for speciation analysis and of surface analytical techniques with improved lateral resolution in the nm scale range. 

Major trends in the future growth of flow analysis are likely to include the evolution of instrument design (including miniaturisation and expert flow systems), the recognition of more flow-based standard methods, hyphenation with other detection systems and an impact on chemical measurements in new and emerging areas of science. 

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