Advances in the development of organic polymer monolithic columns and their applications in food analysis—A review

Monolithic continuous separation media are gradually finding their way to sample pre-treatment, isolation, enrichment and final analytical separations of a plethora of compounds, occurring as food components, additives or contaminants, including pharmaceuticals, pesticides and toxins, which have traditionally been the domain of particulate chromatographic materials. In the present review, recent advances in the technology of monolithic columns and the applications in food analysis are addressed. Silica-based monoliths are excellent substitutes to conventional particle-packed columns, improving the speed of analysis for low-molecular weight compounds, due to their excellent efficiency and high permeability. These properties have been recently appreciated in two-dimensional HPLC, where the performance in the second dimension is of crucial importance. Organic-polymer monoliths in various formats provide excellent separations of biopolymers. Thin monolithic disks or rod columns are widely employed in isolation, purification and pre-treatment of sample containing proteins, peptides or nucleic acid fragments. Monolithic capillaries were originally intended for use in electrochromatography, but are becoming more frequently used for capillary and micro-HPLC. Monoliths are ideal highly porous support media for immobilization or imprinting template molecules, to provide sorbents for shape-selective isolation of target molecules from various matrices occurring in food analysis. The separation efficiency of organic polymer monoliths for small molecules can be significantly improved by optimization of polymerization approach, or by post-polymerization modification. This will enable full utilization of a large variety of available monomers to prepare monoliths with chemistry matching the needs of selectivity of separations of various food samples containing even very polar or ionized compounds.