I might be biased ;), but I think that mass spectrometry has certainly been one of the hotter topics of the past decade. Following the Nobel Prize being awarded to John Fenn and Koichi Tanaka in 2002, developments in the field of MS have really gone fast. Not only the resolving power, accuracy and sensitivity of the hardware has greatly improved: new types of MS machines have become available, such as the Orbitrap-based and ion mobility equipment. Moreover, the applications for large protein analysis, up to whole viral capsids (MDa in size) have opened up opportunities to look into higher order structure and protein interactions in a new manner, which is finding its way within several industries, such as biopharma.
The hot topics at last 10 years ago, using of statistics in analytical chemistry especially chemometric techniques such as ANN, PLS, Design of Experiments, ....etc.
Using of carbon nano tube techniques (CNT) for solid phase extraction
Lab-on-Chip it is a techniques for miniaturizing of analytical instruments