A total of fourteen cuts were defined because the retention time difference between several skin sensitizors was only slight.

Potentiometry is a new detection method for liquid chromatography (LC) and capillary electrophoresis (CE). The principle behind this method is familiar to chromatographers because the signals depend on the partitioning tendency of analytes over the sensor coating and the eluent. This partitioning provokes a change in the surface potential and the detection of these changes can be classified as "potentiometric". A conversion algorithm is needed to convert the generated signals to concentration-related tracings (chromatograms).

Size-exclusion chromatography (SEC) and pyrolysis-gas chromatography (Py-GC) are commonly used to characterize copolymers. SEC is a powerful method to determine the molecular-weight distribution of polymers whereas Py-GC provides valuable information on their chemical composition. The combination of these two techniques could yield combined size and composition information for copolymers or polymer mixtures. A fully automated system was constructed to perform these two-dimensional (2D) characterizations. Several examples of the use of this new technique to comprehensively characterize polymers are described.

The complexity of the systems that are used vary from standard GC configurations to assess the effectiveness of protective clothing to trace analysis of biomedical samples with complex GC configuration.

Conventional pyrolysis can cause defunctionalization of polar structural moieties carrying functional groups, which leads to biased results.

In this article, the author describes the development of a simple enzymatic reactor, which also functions as a microdevice that combines both preconcentration and enzymatic digestion in the nano-electrospray emitter, and its interfacing with a mass spectrometer.

The authors provide suggestions for the sample pretreatment and analysis of aerosol particles including the use of on-line SFE–LC–GC–MS, GCXGC and LC–MS. Although each technique has its merits, the novel multidimensional systems and those integrating sample pretreatment with the final analysis proved to be valuable tools in aerosol analysis.

The guest authors describe the use of LC–MS for the analysis of peptides. They deal with peptide extraction, peptidomic analysis in organisms with and without genomic databases, identification of peptides with conserved N- and C- terminal sequences, and in situ MALDI-TOF peptide profiling.