Multidimensional Gas Chromatography: Advances in Instrumentation, Chemometrics and Applications

Scope of Review. Analysis of volatile and semi-volatile analytes by gas chromatography (GC) methods is an indispensable tool in the analytical chemist’s tool box. A myriad of fields of study rely upon the application of GC methods to address an ever growing demand to provide useful chemical information from GC data. As the realm of GC application has expanded, there has been an evolution to develop more powerful instrumental and data analysis approaches to keep pace with the wealth of complex samples that require analysis. To address this challenge, advances in GC instrumentation having evolved from one-dimensional gas chromatography (1D-GC) and heart cutting approaches such as (GC-GC), to instrumentation referred to broadly as multidimensional gas chromatography (MDGC), which can take on many forms. The principle form of MDGC that has gained wide implementation is comprehensive two-dimensional (2D) gas chromatography (GC × GC) as shown in Figure 1A, pioneered nearly 26 years ago by Liu and Phillips.1 Whe...