High performance separation technologies and spectroscopic tools for plant extract characterization in phytomics

The review is concerned with fast analytical methods for the qualitative and quantitative determination of plant constituents and phytopharmaceutical products. Emphasis is put on the determination of leading compounds, the role of the stationary phase in the analysis of sugars, phenolic compounds, proteins or DNA-mutations and the use of non-standard analytical tools such as micro high performance liquid chromatography (μ-LC) or near infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIR) next to conventional high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Finally the importance of spectroscopic methods such as mass spectrometry (MS) in phytomics will be discussed giving examples for HPLC-MS and μ-HPLC-MS hyphenation. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.