Reversal in elution order in liquid chromatography-compilation of experimental observationsLetter to the Editor To the editorIn today's polypharmacy situation of medical practice, it has become customary for bioanalytical scientists to handle complex chromatography problems as they relate to the separation and quantification of multiple analytes including chiral substrates in the chosen assays (Srinivas, 2004(Srinivas, , 2006(Srinivas, , 2008Xu et al., 2007;Pedersen-Bjergaard and Rasmussen, 2005). Therefore, the elution order of peaks of interest becomes an important factor from both assay development and validation point of view. While it is understood that chromatographic conditions are critical in controlling the elution order, it is generally accepted that within the chosen and validated conditions, mini-adjustments of conditions should not necessarily change the dynamics of separation and more so the elution pattern of the analytes that are being chromatographically separated. A mini-review on this subject matter of reversal of elution order has been published (Okamoto, 2002). This review captures some salient observations relating chiral separations, providing some hints of mechanistic rationale for several examples (Okamoto, 2002).This note aims to cover some of the recent reports that document changes in elution order owing to certain alterations in the chromatographic conditions being employed for the chromatographic separation of various analytes (amino acids, carboxylic acids, polar and basic compounds, etc.). Yoo et al. (2008) found that the employment of an ionic liquid mobile phase modifier such as 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate had a profound influence on the elution of the binary mixture of amino acids. The authors noted that it was important to optimize the exact amount of the ionic liquid mobile phase modifier since it affected the selectivity and caused the reversal of the elution order of the binary amino acid mixture (Yoo et al., 2008). Gyllenhaal and Stefansson (2008) have shown that, under standard conditions of chromatography using Chiralpak AD column, the elution order could be easily reversed by replacement of the polar alcohol modifiers. In the documented example, it was shown that the reversal of the elution sequence of profen acid enantiomers was brought about by the switching of isohexane:2-propranol by methanol:ethanol (Gyllenhaal and Stefansson, 2008). The previous work of the authors also had suggested that the replacement of methanol by 2-propranol as the polar alcohol modifier could bring about elution reversals of enantiomeric peaks for compounds such as ibuprofen, ketoprofen and naproxen (Gyllenhaal and Stefansson, 2005). However, for the enantiomers of flurbiprofen no reversal in elution was observed, although selectivity was considerably diminished by the aforementioned changes in the alcohol modifier (Gyllenhaal and Stefansson, 2005). Zhou et al. (2008) have carried out chromatography of a range of pharmaceutical compounds (neutral, basic and acidic) on two p...