Hyphenations in planar chromatography.

This review is focused on planar chromatography and especially on its most important subcategory high-performance thin-layer chromatography (HPTLC). The image-giving format of the open, planar stationary phase and the post-chromatographic evaporation of the mobile phase ease the performance of various kinds of hyphenations and even super-hyphenations. Examples in the field of natural product search, food and lipid analysis are demonstrated, which point out the hyphenation with effect-directed analysis (EDA) and mass spectrometry and illustrate the efficiency gain. Depending on the task at hand, hyphenations can readily be selected as required to reach the relevant information about the sample, and at the same time, information is obtained for many samples in parallel. The flexibility and the unrivalled features through the planar format valuably assist separation scientists.