Editorial: Tempora tempore tempera

Editorial

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Editorial

Tatiana B. Tennikova

Frantisek Svec

Tempora tempore tempera In the late 1980s when we begun developing monoliths, our life became really difficult. These stationary phases did not represent an incremental improvement of known column technologies. They were completely different. This novelty was not fully understood and we had a hard time to publish our early results. In fact, our first manuscript on this topic that we submitted to the Journal of Chromatography was flatly rejected. Interestingly, our friends Stellan Hjert
n and Nobuo Tanaka who were developing alternative approaches at the similar times had a very analogous experience. As the title of this Editorial says, time heals all wounds. Twenty years later, monoliths represent a well established technology, vast number of papers is published each year on this topic, and a variety of monolithic columns are commercially available. The world best chromatographers are investigating and using these materials and predicting them a very bright future. Although originally developed for applications in HPLC, monoliths are now being used in a variety of other areas such as solid phase extraction, preconcentration, gas chromatography, bioaffinity processing, and microfluidics just to name a few. For example, the use of monoliths for immobilization of proteolytic enzymes enables a significant acceleration of the speed of protein digestion that is a typical part of the proteomic protocols. New developments in polymerization techniques go hand in hand with progress in new applications. The techniques such as polycondensation and cray or electron beam initiated polymerizations add a new flavor to the preparation of monolithic materials. The Journal of Separation Science (JSS) publishes papers concerned with monoliths all the time. These papers are

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2007 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

very popular. Out of 25 most accessed articles published in 2006 in JSS, 11 (or 44%) concerned monoliths. Being always aware of the importance of this field, JSS published the first special issue focused on monolithic columns in 2005. It was an overwhelming success as can be deduced from the large number of hits on the website. Therefore, we decided to continue in this tradition and prepare another special issue concerning monoliths that you hold in hand or see on the screen. Once again, the number of submitted manuscripts was large and their quality mostly excellent. All authors certainly deserve our thanks for both their manuscripts and for submitting them in time. Obviously, it was not possible to cover the field of monoliths in its entirety. However, we believe that we have assembled a nice sampler of what the monolithic materials can do. Thanks to the previous success of this special issue with both our contributors and readers, thematic issues like this concerned with monolithic technologies will be published in the future every other year thus creating another nice tradition in JSS.

Tatiana B. Tennikova

Frantisek Svec www.jss-journal.com