Resumen de Modified Method for Extraction of Photosynthetic Plant Pigments for Microcolumn Chromatography
James A. Ciaccio, Kareem Hassan
Column chromatography of photosynthetic plant pigments is a common experiment in introductory laboratory courses for science majors and nonscience majors alike. We report a simple, rapid, reproducible, and small-scale solid–liquid extraction of photosynthetic pigments from inexpensive, store-bought dried herbs that affords a dark-green extract solution, all of which can be applied directly to a pipet microcolumn made from as little as 0.75 g of silica gel. Carotenes and chlorophylls are cleanly separated using standard steps in microcolumn chromatography: the former elute together within 20 min using gravity and 9:1 (v/v) heptane:EtOAc, and the latter elute together within seconds using air pressure and EtOAc.
