Capillary and nano liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry has recently become one of the primary analytical techniques in many science areas of maior interest, including omics, food security, environmental surveillance, biomedicine, among others. This interest relays on their economical, environmental and analytical advantages, such as low volumes of reagents and sample requirement, gains on chromatographic performance, and enhanced MS sensitivity. In recent decades significant achievements in instrumentation have been reported, which are increasing the scope of applications based on this technique. Nowadays, miniaturized LC instruments with different setups are commercially available or being in-house developed. In brief, this work summarizes the main characteristics of them, underscoring the main parts of the benchtop systems. For this reason, specific topics are discussing the main advantages and challenges of pumping, injection, and detection modules as well as tubing and connectors. Moreover, considering the higher compatibility between miniaturized LC and MS, this coupling provides higher ionization efficiency improving the analytical results, when compared to conventional LC-MS. Consequently, the essential characteristics of atmospheric pressure ionization for miniaturized LC-MS were highlighted, and a discussion regarding the current state-of-art about the use of electron ionization is also presented. In short, this work underlines the main factors related to instrumental advancements and its consequent influence on analytical methods based on miniaturized LC coupled to mass spectrometry. (C) 2020 Published by Elsevier B.V. (AU) |