Making ANalytically Incompatible Approaches Compatible

Analytical science is vital for our society, industry and trade, and it is a crucial enabler of research and innovation. Samples are becoming increasingly complex and this complexity is reflected in the analytical methods and the hardware. To assess the composition and to characterize various properties of highly complex samples, a multitude of analytical techniques are applied and the information is combined to formulate an answer to the analytical question.
The quest for establishing accurate relations between different properties of a sample has become a driving force for contemporary research projects. From an analytical perspective, there are many examples of very successful couplings (“hyphenations”) of analytical methods (e.g. liquid chromatography – mass spectrometry, LC-MS). For the most challenging samples suitable hyphenated systems are, however, not yet established. The MANIAC project (“Making ANalytically Incompatible Approaches Compatible”) aimed to establish a new route to analytical hyphenation by developing interfaces to combine currently-incompatible techniques to establish the correlation between two or more sample properties simultaneously within one on-line experiment.
This dissertation details the application of comprehensive two-dimensional liquid chromatography (LC×LC) for the simultaneous determination of multiple sample properties and their relation. The technique is applied to the characterization of polymeric nanoparticles used in coatings and drug-delivery systems and dye extracts from 17^th- and 19^th-century cultural-heritage objects. Moreover, algorithms are presented for rapid optimization of LC×LC-based analytical methods. Finally, the first implementations of novel enzymatic reactors in multi-dimensional LC frameworks are described to facilitate reaction modulation.