Current trends in supercritical fluid chromatography

Abstract

Supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC), which employs pressurized carbon dioxide as the major component of the mobile phase, has been known for several decades but has faced a significant resurgence of interest in the recent years, thanks to the development of modern instruments to comply with current expectations in terms of robustness and sensitivity. This review is focused on the recent literature, specifically since the introduction of modern systems but in relation to older literature, to identify the changing trends in application domains. Typically, natural products, bioanalysis, food science, and environmental analyses are all strongly increasing. Together with reduced extra-column volumes in the instruments, the advent of sub-2-μm particles and superficially porous particles in the stationary phases is favoring ultra-high-performance SFC (UHPSFC) allowing for improved resolution and faster analyses, but without the constraints of viscous liquids encountered in ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC). Hyphenation to mass spectrometry is also more frequent and opened the way to new application domains, and raises different issues from liquid chromatography mobile phases, especially due to decompression of carbon dioxide. It is also shown that the frontiers between SFC and HPLC are fading, as switching from one method to the other, even within the course of a single analysis, is facilitated my modern instruments. The present review is not intended to be exhaustive but rather giving a snapshot of recent trends in supercritical fluid chromatography, based on the observation of about 500 papers published in English-written peer-reviewed journals from 2014 to 2018. Graphical abstract ᅟ.

Technologies to improve the sensitivity of existing chromatographic methods used for bioanalytical studies

“…Supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) utilizes pressurized carbon dioxide as the main composition of the mobile phase, which has received growing attention in recent years, due to its advantages of greener mobile phase, higher separation power, and lower back pressure (West, ). A tutorial that describe the opportunities, drawbacks, and analytical conditions of SFC has been published by Novakova and co‐workers ().…”

Quantitative Analysis of Prenylated Constituents in Commercial Hops Samples Using Ultrahigh-Performance Supercritical Fluid Chromatography

“…However, so far, no analytical studies on hops using SFx-based methods have been performed. Over the last few years, SFx-based techniques have become an interesting and powerful alternative in natural product analysis as they are applicable for both polar and nonpolar constituents [14][15][16][17]. SFx techniques can be divided into SFE [18], analytical SFC (e.g., UHPSFC [19][20][21]), and preparative SFC (prep-SFC) [22][23][24]).…”

Towards eco‐friendly secondary plant metabolite quantitation: Ultra high performance supercritical fluid chromatography applied to common vervain (Verbena officinalis L.)

“…As a result, high flow rates can be applied without significant loss of chromatographic efficiency, and sub-2 µm particles columns can be used without generation of excessive pressure [9][10][11][12]. Consequently, UHPSFC has increasingly developed to a valuable alternative to organic solvent based reversed phase chromatography in modern natural product analysis [13][14][15]. The main potential of UHPSFC is seen as analytical alternative for the assessment of nonpolar and moderate polar plant constituent; its applicability to more polar compounds is still less researched [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22].…”

“…Consequently, UHPSFC has increasingly developed to a valuable alternative to organic solvent based reversed phase chromatography in modern natural product analysis [13][14][15]. The main potential of UHPSFC is seen as analytical alternative for the assessment of nonpolar and moderate polar plant constituent; its applicability to more polar compounds is still less researched [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. A second limitation in current literature is the focus of most validated, quantitative applications on single secondary metabolite classes.…”