Evolution in miniaturized column liquid chromatography instrumentation and applications: An overview

•Evolution on solvent delivering systems fort miniaturized LC using dual piston reciprocating or syringe-type pumps.•Most used capillary columns in miniaturized LC are packed capillary columns but nowadays monolithic and PLOT columns have also been widely used.•Miniaturized LC systems have been employed in several relevant scientific fields but on proteomic and metabolomic areas they gained special interest.

The purpose of this article is to underline the miniaturized LC instrumental system and describe the evolution of commercially available systems by discussing their advantages and drawbacks. Nowadays, there are already many miniaturized LC systems available with a great variety of pump design, interface and detectors as well as efficient columns technologies and reduced connections devices. The solvent delivery systems are able to drive the mobile phase without flow splitters and promote gradient elution using either dual piston reciprocating or syringe-type pumps. The mass spectrometry as detection system is the most widely used detection system; among many alternative ionization sources direct-EI LC–MS is a promising alternative to APCI. In addition, capillary columns are now available showing many possibilities of stationary phases, inner diameters and hardware materials. This review provides a discussion about miniaturized LC demonstrating fundamentals and instrumentals’ aspects of the commercially available miniaturized LC instrumental system mainly nano and micro LC formats. This review also covers the recent developments and trends in instrumentation, capillary and nano columns, and several applications of this very important and promising field.