Hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography promotes the development of bio-separation and bio-analytical chemistry

Hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (HILIC) has inherent advantages in the separation of hydrophilic or strongly polar substances (e.g., saccharides, glycopeptides, metabolites, etc.) due to strong hydrophilic interactions, which represents an attractive complementary approach to the mainstreamed reversed phase LC. Significant improvement in sensitivity, analyte coverage, throughput, analysis speed, and resolution of HILIC largely promote the development of bio-separation and bio-analytical chemistry. Based on the theoretical guidance, a lot of functional hydrophilic materials have emerged, what follows is that people are more concerned about their innovations and breakthroughs. Meanwhile, the combination of HILIC with various separation and characterization techniques (such as HILIC MS, multidimensional LC) present high separation efficiency towards complex samples in the fields of proteomics, metabolomics, food, and medicine industry. In this review the latest progress in HILIC in the past five years are summarized in order to provide a reliable and perfect guidance for future research in bio-separation.