| Summary: | Separation science is a multi‐faceted discipline, underpinning almost all other fields of science and technology. Its scope encompasses fundamental and cutting edge processes and technologies, based upon exploitation of the physical distribution of chemical and biochemical species between solid, liquid or gaseous ‘phases’, facilitating their separation, purification, and analysis. Separation science plays a particularly pivotal element within the majority of modern analytical methods, methods which continue to support all manner of cutting edge scientific endeavour, including, for example, the current ‘‐Omics’ scientific revolution. As inferred above, separation science can of course vary considerably in physical form and scale, from micro‐extraction, to bench‐top chromatographic methods, to large scale industrial process isolation and preparative systems. However, in each and every case there exists several common factors governing success, perhaps the most significant of which is so‐called ‘phase selectivity’, or the fundamental chemical and biochemical interaction between a molecularly defined/controlled surface or phase, and the individual target or group of molecules.
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