1903, Russian botanist M.S.Tswett published a research paper entitled "a new adsorption phenomenon and its application in biochemical analysis", in which a new method for separating plant pigments by adsorption principle was proposed for the first time. In 1906, he named this method chromatography. This simple separation technique laid the foundation of traditional chromatography. However, due to the slow separation speed and low efficiency at that time, Tswett chromatography technology was not paid attention to by the scientific community at that time for a long time. 1952, James and Martin invented gas chromatography, and thus won the 1952 Nobel Prize in chemistry. In 1957, Golay pioneered capillary gas chromatography.

Gas chromatography, also known as gas chromatography, is a chromatographic separation technology using washing method, which is especially suitable for the separation and purification of biochemical products. Gas chromatography takes gas as mobile phase and solid adsorbent or liquid as stationary phase. It uses the different partition coefficients between the gas phase and the stationary liquid phase of the sample in the chromatographic column. When the vaporized sample is carried into the chromatographic column by carrier gas, the components are repeatedly distributed between the two phases (adsorption-desorption or dissolution-release). Because of the different adsorption or dissolution ability of stationary phase, the running speed of each component in chromatographic column is also different. After a certain column length, the application of pure gas chromatography is relatively small at present, and it is generally combined with other technologies. Traditional packed column and capillary gas chromatography have their own advantages and disadvantages. The resolution of packed column is low because of the high dispersion of analyte on the column, while capillary gas chromatography can avoid solution interference when separating volatile compounds, but there are some problems such as small sample size and low sensitivity. In recent years, the capillary tube bundle consisting of 900 ~ 2 000 capillaries has overcome their shortcomings.

For the analysis of complex multicomponent mixtures, a single method is difficult to solve, and two or more analytical methods are often needed to effectively solve it. Among them, the sensitivity of gas chromatography and mass spectrometry is very high, the minimum detection amount is close, and the sample to be analyzed must be gasified, so gas chromatography-mass spectrometry is more suitable, and it has become the earliest developed GC-MS instrument, which is relatively perfect in all combined technologies. The rapid development of this technology provides a more perfect means for qualitative identification of unknown mixed components and accurate judgment of molecular structure. At present, almost all laboratories engaged in organic matter analysis regard GC-MS as one of the most important qualitative confirmation methods, and in many cases it is also used for quantitative analysis. At present, the rapidly developing small-scale desktop mass spectrometer has become a special detector for gas chromatography-mass spectrometer (MSD).