High-performance liquid chromatography

High-performance liquid chromatography or high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) is a chromatographic technique that is used to separate a mixture of compounds in analytical chemistry and biochemistry so as to identify, quantify or purify the individual components. HPLC has the ability to separate and identify compounds that are present in any sample that can be dissolved in a liquid in trace concentrations as low as parts per trillion. Due to this versatility, HPLC is used in a variety of industrial and scientific applications, such as pharmaceutical, environmental, forensics and chemicals.

HPLC it is a complementary technique to gas chromatography which is particularly suited to analysis of higher molecular weight molecules and very polar compounds with either lower volatility or that are thermally unstable. The principles of HPLC are common to other forms of chromatography where separation is based upon chemical interactions with a mobile and stationary phase. In this case the mobile phase is a solvent and the stationary phase is made up of particles to which different chemical groups may be bound to allow selective separation of the required analyte. HPLC can be used qualitatively and quantitatively for measuring purity or even as part of a clean-up procedure to prepare an analyte for additional investigation. By careful selection of the mobile phase, column and detector specific analytes can be identified within a complicated mixture of other components.

HPLC is a flexible technique that may be used to analyse a large array of compounds. These include raw and intermediate chemical products, aliphatic and aromatic hydrocarbons, amines, amino acids, peptides, proteins, sugars, lipids and large pharmacologically active compounds. Our HPLC uses ultraviolet with a variable wavelength detector which enables the measurement of sample absorption at multiple wavelengths and is more sensitive than the single wavelength detectors.

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