Use of n-Butanol - Formic Acid - Water Mixture in the Paper Chromatography of Amino-Acids and Sugars

Abstract

DURING the course of a systematic investigation of the amino-acids of the sugar cane, it became desirable to record simultaneously the amino-acid distribution in material from several sources. Two-dimensional chromatograms developed by Consden, Gordon and Martin¹, although effecting excellent resolution of the constituents of a mixture, suffer from the disadvantage that only one sample can be mapped at a time. Moreover, the application of controls necessitates the preparation of separate maps. On the other hand, the single-dimensional ‘strip chromatogram’ offers a much more rapid method of analysing mixtures of amino-acids; but the use of phenol-aqueous ammonia as solvent was found to give rather poor separation of individual amino-acids. Under tropical conditions, darkening of the solvent was an added difficulty.