With the rapid developments of subjects including drug discovery,proteomics,traditional Chinese medicine,etc.,the demands for high sensitive and throughput analytical methods become urgent.Chromatographic analysis technology confronts a lot of new challenges.Traditional packing columns still remain a series of inadequacies,such as high cost,low stability,difficult preparation process,high backpressure etc.Recently,polymeric monolithic columns have been proved to be an effective alternative for packed columns,and have attracted considerable interest owing to their facile preparation and good column characteristics,such as permeability and efficiency.To satisfy the requirements for separation and analysis of increasingly complex compounds,the developments for new polymeric monolithic columns with various functionalities have been paid great importance.In this review,the classifications,functionalities,and applications of monolithic colomns are comprehensively introduced,especially the polymeric monolithic column.