Prediction of analyte retention time in liquid chromatography

This review addresses the approaches used to predict chromatographic retention time in a range of liquid chromatographic techniques, with a particular focus on reversed-phase liquid chromatography (RPLC), hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (HILIC), and ion chromatography (IC). This focus has been selected on the basis that prediction of retention for these three chromatographic techniques comprises the bulk of the literature and also because the approaches used differ markedly between these techniques. The literature for this review is drawn predominantly from the period 2015–2020. Many different types of analytes are included in the review, with the exception of peptides and proteins, which are omitted for two main reasons. First, the methodology used for the prediction of retention of peptides and proteins differs significantly from that used for small molecules in that retention is often assumed to derive from the sequence of constituent amino acids, and this approach is not relevant to small molecules. Second, the prediction of retention for proteins and peptides has been the subject of a number of reviews