I am in the process of writing a Method Development guide for our HPLC users. I have a number of different sources of background reference material that I am currently reviewing. I'm still of the opinion that the definitive book is:
Practical HPLC Method Development" book by Snyder, Glajch, and Kirkland.

However,I would not want to overlook any recent good publications or good web sites. Suggestions welcome.

Check out "Instrumental Methods of Analysis" by Willard, Meritt, Dean & Settle.

S.K. Srinivas

Good luck with this task. We considered doing an SOP for this but found it majorly cumbersome. We had great difficulty in reducing the "intuition" aspects and firming up the procedural aspects. A good source of info would be the articles run in LC-GC by J. Dolan

Thanks for the suggestions I also rate the LC-GC articles by John Dolan. I'm not familiar with the "Instrumental Methods of Analysis" book, but I'll check it out. As a further thought does anyone use experimental designs to optimise methods? It can be a way of reducing the "intuition" aspect of method development. Although I agree that there is nothing really to substitute the experience of just doing it.

M Kane

With current technology, developing HPLC methods is a lot like landing an airliner: most of the time it can be done "by the book"-- but you really want an experienced human around for the other occasions!

I've gotten intimately familiar with this whole area because we have just gone through the process of developing an automated method development system with Waters. An earlier, non-automated version with a similar concept is described on our web site:
http://www.lcresources.com/software/drylabmd.html

Both of these are distillations of the concepts described in depth in the Snyder, Glajch, and Kirkland book.

Colin, I sympathize with your comment about the difficulty in reducing the concepts to practice. We ended up dealing with the big problems by recognizing that:
- the objective is not really "optimizing" separations but rather "adequatizing" them; finding conditions good enough to meet the goals of the analysis. Knowing when to quit is very important!
- we had to know what kinds of problems the process would *not* work for. Our goal in the Waters collaboration was 80% success rate with "routine" methods.

-- Tom Jupille / LC Resources Inc.

Hi

Does anybody know if there is any "DryLab" system, or similar like Chrosword (Merck-Hitachi) which can be used with Agilent Chemstation equipment ??

In the analytical development department where I work we didn't know the structure of the most part of impurities and that makes difficult to apply an automatic system to develop HPLC methods.

Thanks

KAF

I am currently looking at the Chromsword system on a demo basis. It does not control any non Merck Hitachi equipment. Furthermore it does not replace the experienced chemist. It has so far only developed 50% of the methods asked of it to a reasonable standard.

DryLab can be used with Agilent equipment, but it will not do "automated" method development. The current version (DryLab 2000 Plus) comes with a Method Development Wizard which supplies a systematic logic for method development, but the user must set up the runs and transfer the data.

DryLab 2000 Plus also includes an "Automation Toolkit" that lets you integrate DryLab into other applications. This lets you do things like find optimum 2- or 3-segment gradients by having an Excel spreadsheet evaluate a large number of DryLab models. In case anyone is interested, there are more details in our current newsletter:
http://www.lcresources.com/resources/resspring02-2.htm

I don't have any recent "hands-on" experience with ChemStation, but if Agilent provides a similar external control capability then it would be relatively straightforward to integrate Excel / ChemStation / DryLab into a customized system to implement a method development strategy of your choice.

If anyone wants to e-mail me privately, I can provide more detailed information and suggestions.

-- Tom Jupille / LC Resources Inc.

Please,suggest a HPLC method for Vitamin C in any food product eg : Oranges.