Desire Luc Massart

It would help to have a restricted set of chromatographic systems (CS) that together serve as potential starting points in method development.

This article presents an overview of the work performed to define generic separation strategies and methods in chiral method development using capillary electrochromatography as a separation technique. Polysaccharide chiral stationary phases were found suitable for this purpose. Two separate strategies were defined, one for acidic and one for non-acidic substances. These strategies were evaluated and found applicable on structurally diverse molecules, showing their generic character.

The authors explain how to construct box plots and how they can help you to learn more about your data.

The second part in this series focuses on the variables in large data tables, looking at the vocabulary used by PCA experts, and explaining some of the background to the method. It further provides practical examples of how these variables operate in practice.

In this, the first of a two-part series, the authors provide some background on the PCA method and introduce some of the terminology used by practitioners of the method.

In the first instalment of this new column, Massart and Vander Heyden review the subject of chemometrics, and in particular its relevance to separation science. The column aims to explain how application of chemometrical techniques can improve both the design of robust analytical methods and the subsequent interpretation of derived results.