Preface

The scope of this e-book entitled "Reviews in Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis" is the coverage and review of new trends and applications in all areas of pharmaceutical and biomedical analytical chemistry.

Our intention was to cover all instrumental analytical methods that are applied to the analysis of compounds with pharmaceutical and biomedical interest, including liquid and gas chromatography, electrophoresis & related techniques, mass spectrometry, hyphenated techniques, automated analytical techniques, spectrometry, luminescence, electroanalysis etc.

We were pleased to see that many authors accepted our invitation to contribute to this e-book covering a wide spectrum of fields. The topics in the order of appearance in the e-book include: an insight on the methods used in the metabolomics analysis (LC-MS, GC-MS, HPLC-DAD, NMR) of several natural matrices with protective health potential (Chapter 1); demonstration of the ability of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) in successfully predicting the response of an Enzyme-linked Immunosorbent assay (ELISA) (Chapter 2); a discussion of the most recent progresses in bioinformatics tools useful in mass spectrometry-based proteomics (Chapter 3); a review of current methods used in quantitative analysis of pharmaceutical compounds from whole blood matrix by liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (Chapter 4); a discussion of how biosensor-based platforms can be used in conjunction with microbial cells for monitoring, environmental and industrial applications (Chapter 5); electroanalytical methods as tools for predictive drug metabolism studies (Chapter 6); a review of sample preparation methodologies prior to the chromatographic determination of benzodiazepines (Chapter 7); a presentation of the most common analytical techniques for the control of the level of apoptosis (Chapter 8); a review on the various analytical methods designed to meet the requirements for cytokinin analyses in complex matrices (Chapter 9); a review on the applications of pressurized liquid extraction technique in phytochemical analysis in last decade (Chapter 10).

We sincerely believe that the book will prove to be a useful contribution to analytical science. We express our appreciation to all of the contributing authors to Bentham Publishers and their team members for the opportunity to publish this volume. Lastly we thank our family members for their support, encouragement and patience during the entire period of this work.