High-performance liquid chromatography

Okay kiddo, have you ever used a strainer to get the big chunks out of your pasta or soup? Chromatography is kind of like that, but instead of straining solids out of liquids, we use it to separate different parts of a liquid mixture.

High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is a special way to do this where we use a machine to separate different parts of a liquid mixture really fast and accurately. The machine has a long tube with tiny particles inside of it that act like a filter. We put the liquid mixture in at one end of the tube and it flows down through the tiny particles.

Each part of the mixture has a different size, shape, and electrical charge, and those things affect how the parts interact with the particles in the tube. So each part of the mixture gets stuck to different parts of the particles at different rates, causing them to come out of the tube at different times and in different amounts.

We can then collect the different parts of the mixture as they come out of the tube, and analyze them to figure out what they are and how much of each one there is. It's a really powerful tool scientists use to help figure out what makes up different things like medicines, food, and even air pollution.