Practical Liquid Chromatography

This practical guide offers an accessible route into fast, highly efficient liquid chromatography. It explains newer column designs, which only came to the fore in roughly the past five years, and shows how they connect to the older thin-layer methods that many analysts already know.

The field developed unevenly over the years, borrowing ideas from several scientific disciplines along the way. Ion-exchange chromatography became closely linked with separating the rare earth elements, while exclusion chromatography proved useful for sorting natural substances such as proteins and manufactured polymers. Partition chromatography, particularly paper chromatography, became essential to biochemists, and the adsorption-based thin-layer variant grew fastest in pharmacognosy and pharmaceutical work. Liquid chromatography, however, long remained peripheral to industrial organic analysis.