Introduction

Chemists use physical methods to separate and analyze complex

mixtures and their corresponding reactions. It is one of the most important
and fundamental skills they must acquire. In any chemical industry it is
needed to separate and purify a product from a complex mixture since it is
an important step in the production line. One of these methods are known as
Chromatography.
There are types of Chromatography and one of these is paper
chromatography or the thin layer chromatography. paper chromatography
uses two phases; the stationary phase, and mobile phase to separate the
components of a colored complex mixture. In the separation process, the
complex mixture is placed in the stationary phase, a porous paper. The
mobile phase is a liquid which when the stationary phase is suspended in it,
the mobile phase slowly goes up through adsorption, carrying the pigments
of the colored complex mixture placed in the stationary phase. As the mobile
phase slowly travels upward, different colored pigments of the complex
mixture travel at different rates and are separated into different spots. Rates
of the flow of the pigments can be computed by dividing the distance of the
solute (complex mixture pigments) by the distance the solvent travel (mobile
phase)
In the experiment, spinach (Spinacia olarecea) pure extract pigments
were separated by the use of paper chromatography. This aims to teach the
experimenters on how to separate pigments from the leaves of the spinach,
to identify different pigments present in the sample and to compute the
approximate rates of the flow of each of the component pigments of the
leaves.

http://www.chemguide.co.uk/analysis/chromatography/paper.html
http://www.britannica.com/science/stationary-phase-chromatography
http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/Core/Analytical_Chemistry/Instrumental_Analysis
/Chromatography
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