Electrophoresis
When my wife was doing her final year projects on fish gellatin, I always heard about electrophoresis. Electrophoresis is a method of separating a mixture of substances that carry an electrical charge. Under the influence of an electrical field the constituent molecular species will move at different rates according to their size, shape and total electrical charge. Electrophoresis is used primarily as an analytical method for small samples of mixtures of charged molecules, particularly proteins, peptides and amino acids, rather than as a fractionation procedure. It can be used in a similar way to preparative layer chromatography to separate the components of fairly simple mixtures.
There has been a considerable revival of interest in analytical electrophoresis in recent years due to the introduction of the technique known as capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE). This technique has the advantage over earlier ones since it can be modified to analysed uncharged molecules as well as charged ones. This technique has not yet been adapted for preparative applications.
