A Critical Evaluation of Hydrophilic-Interaction Chromatography (HILIC)

There are of course number of advantages related to HILIC, as listed in slide 4. The first one is that HILIC will allow sufficient retention of the most hydrophilic compound that does not possess sufficient retention under reversed-phase LC condition. The elution order will be almost reversed compared to reversed-phase LC, but it can also provide orthogonal selectivity and we will discuss some examples later. The very important advantage is MS sensitivity - it can be drastically improved because of a better desolvation of the mobile phase, which contains a huge amount of acetonitrile. Another important feature is that the back pressure remains very low in the HILIC mode because of the high proportion of organic modifier, which enables faster or high-resolution analysis. Finally, another advantage is the possibility to directly analyze solid-phase extraction (SPE) extracts in HILIC, because at the end of the SPE process, a huge amount of organic modifiers are present that are not critical for HILIC experiments. Van Deemter curves are also flatter when using a high proportion of organic solvent.

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