Recent progress in carbohydrate separation by high-performance liquid chromatography based on size exclusion

Since the introduction of stationary phases based on microparticulate porous silica and polymeric sorbents, rigid and semi-rigid, size-exclusion chromatography (SEC) has become established as a form of high-performance liquid chromatography. In recent years, there have beeen revolutionary developments in detection systems for high-performance SEC, which have placed the use of the method for the determination of molecular-size and molecular-weight distributions of polymers on a sound theoretical basis andincreased the range of information on molecular characteristics that can be retrieved from SEC data. This review surveys these changes in SEC systems and their application to the separation and molecular-weight distribution analysis of carbohydrates.