DECONVOLUTION IN ONE-DIMENSIONAL CHROMATOGRAPHY BY HEURISTIC EVOLVING LATENT PROJECTIONS OF WHOLE PROFILES RETENTION TIME SHIFTED BY SIMPLEX OPTIMIZATION OF CROSS-CORRELATION BETWEEN TARGET PEAKS

A new approach to the detection and resolution of co-eluting components is developed for one-dimensional chromatographic analysis. In essence, the method consists of two steps. First, chromatograms from different runs are made comparable by using a simplex technique for adjusting the retention-time shifts so as to optimize the cross-correlation between selected target peaks in the chromatograms. Second, the heuristic evolving latent projections (HELP) method is used to detect and resolve co-eluting peaks in the resulting two-way data array. The new method represents a hybrid between conventional one-way and two-way resolution methods by which a collection of one-way chromatograms on samples with the same chemical components can be treated with chemometrics procedures developed for instruments with multi-wavelength detection. This permits the determination of the number of chemical components under a peak and subsequent resolution and quantification of the chemical components. Hence the hybrid method bridges the gap between traditional and coupled chromatography. The method provides the concentration pattern of each of the chemical components in different samples. In this respect, the approach makes traditional one-way chromatography an important supplement to coupled chromatography for solving problems of, e.g., peak homogeneity, in a series of samples with similar chemical components.