Recent advancements in comprehensive two-dimensional separations with chemometrics

Comprehensive two-dimensional (2D) separations provide the analyst with a tremendous amount of complex data. In order to glean useful information from this complex data, advancements in commercially available software that implement chemometrics are currently available and continue to evolve. Future advancements will no doubt involve commercializing (or adapting) specialized, in-house chemometric techniques that are currently found only in the hands of technical experts and researchers in industry, government, and academia. In order to make timely advancements, future commercialization of novel chemometric techniques should involve collaborations among instrument software manufacturers, professional programmers, technical experts, and researchers. During the last decade, this field has seen a steady advancement from single analyte target analysis to comprehensive non-target analysis of entire multidimensional sample profiles (involving sample classification and/or data mining for discovery-based sample comparisons). The advancements in instrumentation and chemometric software tools have a tremendous impact in various applications: fuels, food, environmental, pharmaceuticals, metabolomics, etc. Most of the development has been for software to apply with gas chromatography-based instrumentation, such as comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC x GC) and comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography with time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC x GC-TOF-MS). More recently there have been notable advancements in liquid-phase instrumentation as well.