Current state of supercritical fluid chromatography-mass spectrometry

Similarly to other hyphenated techniques, supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) highly benefits from the coupling with mass spectrometry (MS) detection as evident from the increasing number of published SFC-MS methods. SFC-MS is nowadays routinely used in numerous application fields and experimentally investigated in many others. The selection of mass analyzers in SFC relies on the same principles as in both liquid and gas chromatography. The overview of published studies revealed that more than 70% of the SFC-MS analyzes are carried out using electrospray ionization, while atmospheric pressure photoionization remains largely neglected. This review aims to describe challenges and principles of the selections of suitable interface considering used ion source and chromatographic conditions. Moreover, differences arising from using SFC contrary to liquid chromatography with atmospheric pressure ionization sources are described. Matrix effect issues in SFC-MS are summarized here as well as the overall applicability across analytical fields.