“…Computer-assisted optimization has been widely applied in different separation modes of liquid chromatography such as normal phase [13,14] , reversed phase [15,16] and ion exchange liquid chromatography [8,9,17] and various modes of elution including isocratic [3,6,16,18] , linear gradient [17,19] , stepwise gradient [15] , nonlinear gradient [16,20] and multi-segment linear gradient [21] . In most cases isocratic elution is only suitable for the analysis of samples with a narrow range of retention.…”