Microemulsion based chromatographic techniques: Past lessons and future directions

Abstract

Microemulsion Liquid Chromatography (MELC) and Microemulsion Electrokinetic Chromatography (MEEKC) respectively have emerged as new forms of analytical techniques for the separation of drugs of different water solubilities, solving different separation challenges and offer a variety of applications in pharmaceutical industry and routine quality control analysis of drugs. A comprehensive review of the literatures on recent developments in the field of Microemulsion based techniques was made. Various literatures dealing with microemulsion based chromatographic techniques were collected and studied extensively. Major findings of all the important literatures were summarized and classified in an appropriate manner to help reader understand the types, methods and applications of the technique. This article covers basic concepts of microemulsion, their optimization parameters, advantages and disadvantages and a plethora of applications and research done over the last decade. Almost all the major researches done in the field were tried to cover. Microemulsion based chromatographic techniques have been proved to be a newer and interesting technique that is extensively studied nowadays. Due to their polyphasic structure, microemulsion as eluent in both MELC and MEEKC offers a large number of advantages, applications and capability in separating the mixture of components.

Graphical Abstract

Keywords:

• Analytical Technique
• capillary electrophoresis
• liquid chromatography
• microemulsion
• surfactant

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.