In June 2016, the city of Olomouc in the Czech Republic hosted the conference “Advances in Chromatography and Electrophoresis 2016 and Chiranal 2016.” The conference was organized at the Regional Centre of Advanced Technologies and Materials, Palacký University in Olomouc, by the Department of Analytical Chemistry and the Working Group of Chromatography and Electrophoresis of the Czech Chemical Society.

The scientific program started with a great plenary lecture, “Quinine and quinidine derivatives as exceptional chiral selector motifs for the resolution of chiral acids, bases and ampholytes by LC and SFC,” given by Prof. Lindner (Vienna, Austria). The next day, the program continued with interesting themes and speakers such as Prof. Fanali (Rome, Italy), Prof. Lämmerhofer (Tübingen, Germany), Prof. Rizzi (Vienna, Austria), Prof. Eijkel (Twente, Netherlands), Prof. d’Orlyé (Paris, France), Prof. Nováková (Hradec Králové, Czech Republic), and Prof. Hutta (Bratislava, Slovakia). The conference ending was marked by a magnificent plenary lecture by Prof. František Švec (Berkeley, CA, USA), “New trends in the preparation and application of porous polymer monoliths in chromatography,” as a part of the Rudolf Zahradnik Lecture Series organized by the Regional Centre of Advanced Technologies and Materials and Palacký University. In addition to these, the program consisted also of many lectures and poster presentations presented by young researchers and students who demonstrated their interest in doing great science.

Here, it is my great pleasure to introduce some of the articles dedicated to the symposium. An interesting paper dealing with the development and validation of the HILIC-MS/MS method for analysis of ephedrine in internet-available drugs is presented. In the next paper, the HPLC-UV method is used for the determination of uric acid, xanthine, and hypoxanthine in human plasma and serum for tracking the uric acid metabolism. Attention should be also paid to a study in which capillary electrophoresis hyphenated with tandem mass spectrometry was applied for analysis of drugs to treat Crohn’s disease. Then, a very interesting comparison of normal-phase HPLC and supercritical fluid chromatography for enantioseparation of chiral sulfoxides on amylose-based columns is presented. Finally, the chiral separation of aclidinium bromide, a drug for relieving symptoms of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, is described using a negatively charged cyclodextrin in capillary electrophoresis. I believe you will find all these articles interesting and inspiring for your research.

Finally, I thank all the authors for their interesting contributions, participants attending the symposium and sharing their great ideas, all the people who organized the conference, all reviewers for evaluation of the papers, the Chromatographia editors, and the Chromatographia team for the preparation of this collection. Last but not least, I acknowledge the support of the Regional Centre of Advanced Technologies and Materials, Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic (NPU LO 1305).

Jan Petr