High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) is a technique in analytical chemistry used to separate, identify, and quantify each component in a mixture. It relies on pumps to pass a pressurised liquid solvent, containing the sample mixture, through a column filled with a solid adsorbent material. Each component in the sample interacts slightly differently with the adsorbent material, resulting in different flow rates and thus the separation of components as they flow out the column. HPLC has been used for: manufacturing (production process of pharmaceutical and biological products), legal (detecting performance enhancement drugs in urine), research (separating the components of a complex biological sample, or synthetic chemicals), and medical (detecting vitamin D levels in blood serum) purposes. HPLC was originally developed for the analysis of organic acids secreted by photosynthetic microbes, including cyanobacteria and algae, into media, but can also be used to analyse organic acids secreted by any microorganism cultivated in liquid medium.
See below for a protocol that describes the analysis of secreted organic acids in extracellular media, using HPLC.
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