High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) has become a practical, useful method for the separation and analysis of various types of soluble compounds. The development of liquid chromatography as an efficient separation technique was always dependent on the synthesis of suitable packing materials. Currently, silica-based packings are most widely used as a support for HPLC, owing to their high mechanical strength, narrow particle size distribution, high specific surface area, variance of pore size and well-documented chemistry of surface modification. 1 However, the silica-based packings have two significant limitations.1,2 One is remaining adsorptivity towards basic compounds due to silanol interaction, leading to asymmetric peaks. The second is a lack of pH stability because the silica back-bone, Si-O-Si, hydrolyzes at pH >8, and the siloxane bond is unstable at pH <2. Many attempts have been undertaken to overcome these drawbacks of silica-based materials: 1 coating with a sterically protected or densely bonded modifying layer 3 , modification with a polymeric reagent 4 , and coating with an inorganic oxide. 5,6 Nonetheless, these methods fall far short of fulfilling the requirements of the ideal support. Probably the most promising solution is the use of other oxides, e.g. alumina 2 , titania and zirconia 1,7,8 , magnesia 5 , other than silica as packing materials. Of the above-mentioned oxides, zirconia was reported to have the greatest potential for use as a packing material, owing to its high chemical and mechanical stability and defined properties. Kawahara and co-workers 9,10 have reported the commercially available zirconia were of interest as packing materials for liquid chromatography. Unger et al. 1,11 have compared the chromatographic performance of zirconia, silica, alumina and titania in the normalphase HPLC mode. Their results indicate that zirconia is superior in the separation of basic compounds. Nawrocki et al. 12 have studied the physical and chemical properties of microporous zirconia which exhibited excellent properties as a packing material. Modified zirconia with fluoride 13 , phosphate 14 and ethylenediamine-N,N′-tetramethylphosphonic acid (EDTPA) 15 have been investigated by Carr and colleagues for HPLC separation of proteins. They have also prepared carbon-16 and polymer-coated 17 zirconias as reversedphase chromatographic supports, and evaluated their liquid chromatographic performance. Trudinger et al. 8 have found that the separation ability of n-octadecylbonded zirconia packing materials is similar to those of silica-based materials except for showing pronounced pH stability up to pH 12 in aqueous organic mobile phase. Yu et al. 18 have prepared and evaluated zirconia bonded phases in hydrophilic interaction chromatography. Although zirconia-based packing materials are quite promising, they also have some limitations: they exhibit relatively low efficiency of some separation, owing to their poor pore structure. 19 A substantial amount of their zirconia surface is exposed in most...