This book is the sixteenth in a series of volumes consisting of collections of papers presented at various international meetings. This one contains the proceeding of the Second Annual American-Eastern European Symposium on Advances in Liquid Chromotography. It contains 23 papers organized into 7 chapters. Topics covered are applications of high-performance liquid chromatography, various forms of open-column liquid chromatography, and thin-layer chromatography. There is an emphasis on the chromatography of biochemically and medically important substances.
As one might expect from a collection of papers from a symposium on a subject area as vast as liquid chromatography, the range of topics is quite broad. One may, therefore, criticize the lack of depth in any one particular area. However, this book does cover a representative range of topics. Several papers were devoted to the physical chemistry of the separation process. Optimization methods and the effects of the physical and chemical properties of mobile and stationary phases were examined. In keeping with the technological explosion in biochemistry, many of the papers were devoted to the chromatography of proteins. While high-performance liquid chromatography was the most frequently utilized technique, there were numerous applications of TLC, including two papers on displacement chromatography. Indeed, the number of papers citing the use of TLC seemed rather high compared with contemporary work. Many of the papers contained extensive introductions and ample bibliographies, providing the less specialized reader with a review of the topic area. Several papers focused on clinical implications and results obtained from chromatographic data.
This book generally lacks focus and organization. While the title suggests a focus on liquid chromatography as a discipline, this book is largely a description of some applications of liquid chromatography in pharmaceutical, clinical, and biochemical analysis, although some papers were concerned with the elucidation of the chromatographic process. The organization of the papers under the seven chapter headings was sometimes faulty. The individual papers were well developed, and the authors added to our understanding of liquid chromatography and expanded the body of technical knowledge, but the reader was not often shown truly novel approaches to separation problems. This book might have been more complete if some papers had dealt more with areas of' rapidly expanding technology. HPLC with mass spectral, electrochemical, or FT-IR detection, multidimensional chromatography, post-and precolumn reaction techniques, and chiral-phase chromatography come to mind.
As this book is a collection of research papers, it is more valuable as an addition to an already extensive journal library rather than as a text or reference. It is a worthy addition to the literature concerning applications of liquid chromatography.