"Wet" chemometrics : method optimisation and extraction of information from fast and / or miniaturised separation methods .

In the pharmaceutical and biomedical analysis the tendency exists to develop on the one hand miniaturised methods and fast ones on the other . The first type of methods requires only minimal amounts of sample and save enormously in the volumes of used solvents . This is imprtant seen from ecological point of view on the one hand and from an economical one on the other, since one is saving beside in solvents also in expensive aid-substances used in the mobil phase of a chromatografic method, as for instance cyclodextrines for chiral separations . A first goal of this project consists in the development of miniaturised HPLC methods for, among others, chiral separations, and further in the statistical and chemometrical comparison of the performance of them with the traditional techniques . Fast chromatographic methods are important for logP determinations in drug discovery where one searches for high-throughput screening methods that allow lots of measurementsin a short time . Beside that, fast methods also allow to couple HPLC on-line in a proces . Here one could then for instance measure a chromatogram every two minutes and combine the different chromatograms in a matrix . Treatment of these data analogously to spectra should allow to use in chromatography the different chemometrical techniques applied in spectroscopy, in order to determine for instance when a given proces (reaction, blending) is finished . It is also our aim to screen during the course of the project the possibilities of such on-line HPLC .