What Does TLC Mean?

Among various meanings of TLC like The Last Cigarette—a smoking cessation program that offers numerous resources and tools to assist smokers in their quit efforts, there is also Thin Layer Chromatography, an analytical technique, which can be useful to check the process of quitting smoking and allow to observe differences in nicotine metabolism. The task of this research was checking sufficiency of thin layer chromatography followed by densitometry for monitoring process of cutting down on smoking. Assembled data suggested that during one week after stopping smoking small amounts of main nicotine metabolites were still being removed with urine from the organism. The chromatographic analysis of nicotine and its main metabolites are multi-stage process which is characterized by about 80% recoveries but a satisfactory reproducibility (2.8%-9.2%). These results also depend on stationary phases applied for TLC/HPTLC (High Performance Thin Layer Chromatography) and problems connected with material applied to separate main nicotine metabolites have been solved. If the chromatographic plates for TLC used for this research were properly marked by HPLTC, confusion caused by various meaning of TLC abbreviation would be eliminated.