Preparation of Horizontal Miniature TLC Developing Chamber for Ultra-thin Layer Chromatography

Abstract

This paper describes a horizontal miniature developing chamber suitable for ultrathin layer chromatography (UTLC) and TLC-MS. The miniature developing chamber was designed by a CAD system and cut out from a PTFE block with a milling machine. The basic performance of the laboratory-made chambers was evaluated through TLC separations of lipids extracted from cyanobacteria on a commercially available silica gel 60-coated glass plate. The present miniature TLC chamber showed good performance comparable to a commercially available normal-size twin-trough vertical TLC chamber. In the present paper, ultra-thin layer plate was also prepared by decorating ZnO nanowires on a glass slide, and was applied to UTLC separation of synthetic pigments. The ZnO nanowire-array plate showed unique retention characteristics which allowed us to separate nile red and neutral red in the miniature TLC chamber.