ИСТИНА

There is no unified procedure for characterization and comparison of HILIC and mixed-mode columns. Only a few works applied chemometric approaches (PCA or cluster analysis). Chemometric-assisted approaches could be useful for the comparison and grouping of stationary phases used in HILIC, for comparing homemade adsorbents with commercially available ones, for confirming successful substrate modification, and for evaluating retention mechanism. In this work, 70 homemade columns and commercially available amino phases were characterized in terms of the Tanaka HILIC test (7 selectivity parameters) and by the retention factors for 33 polar compounds. The literature data for commercially available columns were added in the dataset. PCA was used to obtain two separate sets of linearly uncorrelated dimensions based on Tanaka test values and the retention factors, respectively. Several approaches to clustering were applied to reveal the groups of columns with similar characteristics. Some outlier columns both with polymer and monomer functional layers were detected. The results of the clustering and the visual representations of the dataset were also compared between the Tanaka test-based and retention factors-based ones. The results of the PCA and clustering allowed us to get some insights into the similarities in properties between the groups of stationary phases of different functional layer structure, reveal the correlations between the retention of some polar compounds, and select the analytes useful for columns characterization.