History of chromatography

Chromatography, literally "color writing",[1] was used—and named— in the first decade of the 20th century, primarily for the separation of plant pigments such as chlorophyll (which is green) and carotenoids (which are orange and yellow).

New forms of chromatography developed in the 1930s and 1940s made the technique useful for a wide range of separation processes and chemical analysis tasks, especially in biochemistry.

The earliest use of chromatography—passing a mixture through an inert material to create separation of the solution components based on differential adsorption—is sometimes attributed to German chemist Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, who in 1855 described the use of paper to analyze dyes.

Unlike modern paper chromatography, capillary analysis used reservoirs of the substance being analyzed, creating overlapping zones of the solution components rather than separate points or bands.

[12] In 1897, the American chemist David Talbot Day (1859–1915), then serving with the U.S. Geological Survey, observed that crude petroleum generated bands of color as it seeped upwards through finely divided clay or limestone.

He used a liquid-adsorption column containing calcium carbonate to separate yellow, orange, and green plant pigments (what are known today as xanthophylls, carotenes, and chlorophylls, respectively).

He first used the term chromatography in print in 1906 in his two papers about chlorophyll in the German botanical journal, Berichte der Deutschen Botanischen Gesellschaft.

[22] In pursuit of better and easier methods of identifying the amino acid constituents of peptides, Martin and Synge turned to other chromatography media as well.

[31] In 1987 Pedro Cuatrecasas and Meir Wilchek were awarded the Wolf Prize in Medicine for the invention and development of affinity chromatography and its applications to biomedical sciences.