Chromatography is a laboratory technique used to separate a mixture into its individual components. The mixture is dissolved in a fluid solvent called the mobile phase, which carries it through a system on which a material called the stationary phase is fixed. The stationary phase can be a solid, a liquid, or a gas, depending on the type of chromatography being used. The different types of chromatography include:
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Liquid Chromatography: This is used for thermal unstable and non-volatile samples. It is especially useful for separating complex mixtures into their individual components.
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Gas Chromatography: This is a simple, multifaceted, highly sensitive, and rapidly applied technique for the excellent separation of very minute molecules. It is used in the separation of very little amounts of analytes.
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Paper Chromatography: This is used to determine some types of sugar and amino acids in bodily fluids, which are associated with hereditary metabolic disorders.
Chromatography can be used as an analytical tool, feeding its output into a detector that reads the contents of the mixture. It can also be used as a purification tool, separating the components of a mixture for use in other experiments or procedures. Analytical chromatography is done normally with smaller amounts of material and is for establishing the presence or measuring the relative proportions of analytes in a mixture. Preparative chromatography, on the other hand, is used to separate the components of a mixture for later use and is thus a form of purification.
Chromatography is used in many fields, including the pharmaceutical industry, the food and beverage industry, the chemical industry, forensic science, environmental analysis, and hospitals. It is capable of separating all the components of a multicomponent chemical mixture without requiring an extensive foreknowledge of the identity, number, or relative amounts of the substances present. Some forms of chromatography can detect substances present at the attogram (10^-18 gram) level, making it an accomplished trace analytical technique.
