The 35th International Symposium on High Performance Liquid Phase Separations and Related Techniques, which alternates between Europe and North America, with occasional side meetings in Japan and China, was held in Boston, Massachusetts for the third time, June 19–24, 2010. More affectionately known as HPLC 2010, the symposium is the premier scientific event for bringing together the myriad techniques related to separations in liquid and supercritical fluid media. Chaired by Dr. Steve Cohen of Waters (Milford, Massachusetts), HPLC 2010 assembled 1232 scientists from a total of 40 countries. This number included 305 vendor representatives from over 59 exhibitors for the three-day instrument, software, and consumables exhibition. Students constituted nearly a fifth of the conferees, which speaks highly of the next generation of separation scientists. Based upon the number of attendees and exhibitors, the worldwide economic crisis did not play heavily into the support for this important conference; the attendance was flat from HPLC 2009 (1).

The five-day-plus event had a total of 114 orals in plenary and parallel sessions and 585 posters in sessions with 29 themes. With an ample social event schedule, 12 vendor workshops (some with free snacks), 9 tutorial educational sessions, and 10 short courses, the latter held during the previous weekend, attendees had their hands full deciding how to allocate their time. The tutorials were particularly well attended and covered current topics such as capillary electrophoresis–mass spectrometry (CE–MS) and liquid chromatography (LC)–MS, multidimensional LC, hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (HILIC), solid-phase microextraction (SPME), regulatory issues, microfluidics, quality by design, and the development of commercial liquid chromatography.

Trends in Liquid Phase Technology and Techniques

Table I: HPLC 2010 papers presented by technology or technique

Table I provides a rough breakdown of the coverage of liquid-phase technology and techniques in the separation sciences. Compared to HPLC 2009 (1), some slight shifts in technology emphasis were noted. Again this year, new developments in column technology led the pack. About a quarter of the columns' papers dealt with monoliths. Although not yet considered a commercial success, research interest in this technology is still running high. Silica gel–based monoliths are seeing their second generation of commercial products with better efficiency but slightly higher pressure drops due to the change in the macropore/mesopore domain ratios. Presentations on polymer-based monoliths outnumbered silica-based monoliths 2:1. A continuation of new developments in polymeric monoliths devoted to the separation of small molecules has shown improvements in column efficiency; originally the small molecule domain was for the silica-based monoliths only. Three other "hot" areas in column technology this year were

• More emphasis on the new breed of superficially porous packings (also referred to as shell particles, poroshell, and fused-core packings) that rival the sub-2-μm particles in terms of column efficiency but with substantially lower pressure drops.
• The widespread attention to the technique of HILIC for the separation of polar analytes that are not well retained by reversed-phase chromatography.
• A very hot but rather specialized topic was the use multidimensional chromatography, especially comprehensive LC×LC, which had over 50% more papers than at HPLC 2009 (1). With chromatographers encountering more complex samples, sometimes with thousands of compounds present, these multidimensional techniques are about the only way to tackle such mixtures