Abstract
INTRODUCTION
Analytic separations assure that food and other products are pure, monitor the
quality of air and water and contribute to the development of new products
from semiconductors to plastics. Classical techniques such as chromatography
and spectroscopy may sound like the stuff of high school chemistry, but they
are evolving and still very much alive.
New technology is rapidly transforming analytic separations into an industry
of growth that is finding more and more applications. Tests that once took
days in a laboratory can now be done in minutes in the field. Hand-held
devices identify pollutants in stack gases or sift through thousands of
possible environmental chemicals. New instruments are changing the rate at
which technology flows from the laboratory into the marketplace.
Whether the problem is isolating a substance of commercial interest in the
laboratory, purifying a product, or cleaning waste from contaminated soil, the
technology to separate and purify molecules of choice is of critical
importance in industry.
Based on the monthly newsletter Analytic Separations News, this anthology
informs readers of the fast growing fields of high technology organic and
molecular separations, from venerable techniques like electrophoresis to
microarrays, membranes and amplification. This review reports the news on
biosensors, chromatography, electrophoresis, spectrometry, spectroscopy,
microarrays, membranes, photonics, amplification, magnetics and peripherals.
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