Chromatography as a science will stay forever until and unless someone develops a radically different approach to separate complex mixtures. This will be another Nobel prize. The newer development would be in the column technology i.e. newer and newer phases. Few decades ago, we only had alumina and silica. Now there is a plethora of materials like carbons, titania, zirconia, germania, hafnia etc. This area is never ending. Also newer and newer particle morphologies will become available. A big achievement in LC would be obtaining ultra-high efficiencies...by that I mean exceeding millions of plates per meter by learning how to pack smaller particles into narrow or wider columns. Chromatography never makes its way to JACS, but two years ago we saw a breakthrough when someone packed nanometer sized silica, in capillaries and obtained millions of plates, beating the state-of-art UHPLC in terms of efficiencies.

As for me, I tend to think that liquid chromatography as a reliable method in the routine analysis will be widely used for a long time. By the other way, LC will remain in force as a good way to separate individual analytes from complex matrix for their further MS/MS analysis in the metabolomic studies.

On the analogy of the thin-layer chromatography, LC will stay with us for a long time and will carve out its specific niche.

I have been thinking about using LC strongly for the analysis of Inorganic Complexes, Complexes like Drug-metal etc. I have seen a very few works are reliable based on using LC or LC/MS to characterize inorganic complexes. I do not know how to explain it, but truly, I feel it will be a great tool to quantify ligands from their complexes but if the ligands itself remain unchanged. Yes! Mr. Roman A Sidorov , LC will continue with us.

Chromatography as a science will stay forever until and unless someone develops a radically different approach to separate complex mixtures. This will be another Nobel prize. The newer development would be in the column technology i.e. newer and newer phases. Few decades ago, we only had alumina and silica. Now there is a plethora of materials like carbons, titania, zirconia, germania, hafnia etc. This area is never ending. Also newer and newer particle morphologies will become available. A big achievement in LC would be obtaining ultra-high efficiencies...by that I mean exceeding millions of plates per meter by learning how to pack smaller particles into narrow or wider columns. Chromatography never makes its way to JACS, but two years ago we saw a breakthrough when someone packed nanometer sized silica, in capillaries and obtained millions of plates, beating the state-of-art UHPLC in terms of efficiencies.

Cooooooomo?

There are a lot of references with many practical examples : (e.g.)

Journal of Chromatography A

Volume 892, Issues 1–2, 15 September 2000, Pages 435–453

Analytical Separations 2000

Review

Recent and future developments of liquid chromatography in pesticide trace analysis

Not only LC, Chromatography in general is a novel branch of analytical science for separation and assay of a variety of chemicals. I fully agree with the explanation mentioned by Dr. Farooq. Chromatography coupled with nano technology will be the future study of investigations. 

While we discuss the future of liquid chromatography, this future has already come. We can see clearly the trends which will form the appearance of the method during a long time: miniaturization, acceleration, efficiency growth and, of course, combination with MS/MS detection. HPLC alone can be universally spread by coming into every home in the form of miniature automated systems. Another obvious direction is further blurring the fundamental differences between the chromatographic methods,  one example of which is the development of supercritical fluid chromatography.

The potential for large utilization  may be in the clinical lab. Today, LC-UV provides the most reliable  diagnosis for diabetes, the well known HbA1c analysis; separating glycated and non-glycated hemoglobin to determine long term glucose in whole blood. In the future, LC-MS/MS or LC-HRMS willl replace immunoassays, because you don't need to use expensive antibodies, and you will only use about 50 uL serum for the determination of more than 100 proteins in one single multiplexed analysis. The use of nanoLC columns will depend on the technology to downscale also the instrumentation properly. Today, I have 1-2 min  cycle time for 2.1 mm columns, also with gradients, perfect for vitamin D analysis (400/day), but for nanoLC, with my 50 or 30 um ID columns, it takes me 10-20 minutes before the gradient reaches the columnn, and you will need at least 10 more LC-MS/MS instruments to do the job.  So, give me instruments with low system volumes, and I can use nanoLC also for routine analysis.

The LC associated with more common detectors should be popularized and widely used in commercial laboratories and routine.

In research laboratories the tendency is to use it associated with mass spectrometry and no doubt in UPLC system automated and miniaturized.

The LC over time will be less used in research but are still maintained by many years laboratories so that future users can enteder the basis of chromatography as well as técnidas thin phase chromatography (TLC)

LC has at least two important limitations:

1) Column technology is proprietary, limiting the possibilities for developing definitive reference methods; retention mechanisms are hard to characterize, they are not always under the control of the analyst, and they may depend on (very) minority sites.

2) There is no such thing as a universal liquid-phase detector. LC-MS is expensive and the possibilities for ionising (hence detecting) analytes are limited by the acid-base properties of water. UV detectors are widely used for example in pharmaceutical analysis, to the extent that one sometimes reads about little else; of course they are far from universal, but all the alternatives have even greater limitations.

Capillary electrophoresis, with the usual range of electrolyte additives, promised to fix the first point above (a method can be defined from first principles). Unfortunately, though it's a major technique in genomics (for example), instruments really suitable for analytical chemistry have not been developed. Inlet and outlet connections need to be double junction. The UV detector is particularly insensitive here; a partial solution involves an array detector mounted along the length of the column, together with signal averaging software, but it doesn't seem to be commercially available.

One aspect of liquid phase detection seems to have been neglected: combustion detection using a flame or other means. A few element specific detectors have been  available for a long time, but they don't seem to have 'caught on'.

Microcolumn flow rates are likely to be compatible with injection into a GC flame detector. The obvious choice is the nitrogen-phosphorus detector, but some compounds such as as water and formic acid (and perhaps some fluorinated solvents) could be used with the sensitive and nearly-universal flame ionisation detector. Such a development would involve generating a market for small volumes of ultra-pure solvents. Nowadays there doesn't seem to be much academic research into separation instrument technology.

About 15 years ago I needed a specific detector for traces of sulfur compounds, but couldn't buy one. Surprisingly no-one seems to have thought of using a  reaction detector and phase separator (as is done for some metals by AAS), using the well-known reduction to H2S with Raney nickel and HCl. There are various ways of detecting H2S (lead acetate paper detects µg). I mention this because it demonstrates a certain stagnation in the field.

As on today HPLC remains and will continue to remain as a popular analytical technique. As for pharmaceutical people are concerned, it is a pharmacopoea approved technique for different pharmaceutical analysis. Lot of developments are taking place in Column as well as pump technology and today we have UHPLCsystems which use very short columns and high efficiency pumps.  Ion Mobility Spectrometry is developed as an alternative to HPLC, where we can achieve separations in seconds while HPLC may take a long time to achieve the same degree of separation. But IMS is not projected as a total replacement of LC. Hence, in a wide area of research where people work with a variety of non-volatile as well as high molecular weight compounds, HPLC will continue to maintain it's position as a preferred separation technique.  

Separation is and always will be important in analytical chemistry. To date, there has yet to be a more versatile method for separation with tandem analysis than liquid chromatography. With the advent of small particles and UHPLC, we can now process smaller amounts of samples faster than ever. Micro LC is being developed along with mini mass spectrometers so that we can carry analysis tools in a small back pack, which is probably the future of the field. The only thing that will "kill" LC would be a cheaper and more efficient separation method that can be attached to a sensitive detection device.

It is going to be incredibly difficult to top the current methods of LC that we have, but there is always the possibility.

Returning to my earlier comment about the absence of a universal detector, it may be worth remarking that the particle beam LC/MS interface of a quarter century ago did perform that role --- sometimes. Electron and chemical ionisation are, together, nearly universal, but (according to the theory) the momentum separator was effective only when the amount and properties of the analyte permitted the formation of discrete particles. I don't know if the technique could be revived, perhaps by exploiting more recent developments in ion mobility separation methods.

Hi Christoffer, really cool to to consider earlier approaches! Sometimes they make a comeback.  SFC, for example, has enjoyed a revival recently, it seems. Someone should write "reminding papers" of older techs, so they arent forgotten.