Monoliths Media: Stationary Phases and Nanoparticles

Monoliths media are gaining interest as excellent substitutes to conventional particle-packed columns. Monolithic columns show higher permeability and lower flow resistance than conventional liquid chromatography columns, providing high-throughput performance, resolution and separation in short run times. Monolithic columns with smaller inner diameter and specific selectivity to peptides or enantiomers have been played important role in hyphenated system. Monolithic stationary phases possess great efficiency, resolution, selectivity and sensitivity in the separation of complex biological samples, such as the complex mixtures of peptides for proteome analysis. The separation of complicated biological samples using columns is being revolutionized by new technologies for creating monolithic stationary phases. These techniques using porous monoliths offer several advantages, including miniaturization and on-line coupling with analytical instruments. Moreover, monoliths are the best support media for imprinting template-specific sites, resulting in the so-called molecularly-imprinted monoliths, which have an extremely high selectivity. In this chapter, the origin of the concept, the differences between their characteristics and those of traditional packings, their advantages and drawbacks, theory of separations, the methods for the monoliths preparation of different forms, nanoparticle monoliths and metal-organic framework are discussed. Two application areas of monolithic metal-organic framework and nanoparticle monoliths are provided.