Microbial production of recombinant proteins has become one of the most important tools in modern biotechnology and drug discovery. The production of the drug insulin is probably the best-known example.
Not only in university laboratories, but especially in the laboratories of the pharmaceutical industry or of contract research laboratories, HPLC methods play an important role e.g. as purity tests of medicines and their active pharmaceutical ingredient during quality control. Therefore, let's take a closer look at the HPLC system.
High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) is a technique widely used to separate various substances in solution. A HPLC system could be thought as an example of a steady flow:
Pressure fluctuations in an HPLC system are more than just a technical nuisance - in pharmaceutical quality control, they can compromise the reliability of analytical results and, consequently, the validity of the test being performed.
In HPLC systems everything is associated with each other. There is not one common solution for one specific problem. Of course, pressure is completely normal for high pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC). This is the backpressure of the eluents, which are pumped through very narrow capillaries onto a tightly packed column. So, what can go wrong? Quite a lot!