Chromatographic methods — Introduction

Although some historians trace the origins of chromatography back to antiquity, the work of the Russian botanist Tswett is generally remembered. By separating chlorophyll pigments in the form of colored rings on a column filled with calcium carbonate, he gave the name chromatography (color separation) to the method (1903). Here are a few key dates in the development of chromatography:

1903 - Pigment separation (Tswett)

1931 - Preparative separations (Kuhn and Lederer)

1938 - Thin-layer chromatography (Ismailov and Shraiber)

1939 - Ion exchange chromatography (Samuelson)

1941 - Partition chromatography (Martin and Synge)

1952 - Gas chromatography on packed columns (James and Martin)

1954 - Separation of amino acids by ion exchange chromatography (Moore and Stein)

1959 - Gas chromatography on capillary columns (Golay)

1962 - Supercritical phase chromatography (Klesper)

1968 - High-performance liquid chromatography (Giddings and Kirkland)

As can be seen, few analytical techniques have enjoyed a comparable and as diversified boom as chromatography over the last five decades. To a large extent, this success is due to the combination of a rapid, high-performance separative method and a wide range of sensitive detectors, enabling not only quantification of the species separated, but also, in some cases, species identification.

As a result, chromatography lends itself well to the analysis of complex mixtures such as those found in fields as diverse as petroleum products, polymers or biological fluids, and to the analysis of traces in media as varied as environmental studies or the control of the optical purity of therapeutic molecules.