High Performance Liquid Chromatography: Potential for Protein Seperations

During the past decade, technological innovations based on new knowledge of the principles underlying separations processes have transformed column liquid chromatography, the oldest chromatographic technique, into a sophisticated tool for rapidly achieving the most difficult of separations and analyses. Applications of this modern version called High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) are growing at a tremendous rate, as evidenced by an increase in instrument sales by more than 35% a year for the past several years. The HPLC chromatogram shown in Figure 1 depicts the separation of a homologous series of amphoteric surfactants. The direct analysis of such materials was not possible before we developed this HPLC method (Parris, 1977). O f particular impor-