Chemometric-assisted method development in reversed-phase liquid chromatography.

The computer-assisted development of separation procedures in liquid chromatography (LC), which has involved the adaptation of diverse chemometric techniques and the incorporation of successive advances in informatics and computing over a period of more than four decades, has provided chromatographers with commercial and academic tools of great utility. These tools enable the development, optimization (including robustness studies) and transfer of procedures that constitute one of the analytical activities most commonly used at present in laboratories and industries worldwide. Departing from a typical operational scheme of manually developed chromatographic procedures, this review describes some of the different tools and options that chemometrics provides to the chromatographer for the computer-assisted approach, and outlines the present status of this approach and possible reasons why it is still not considered fully satisfactory.