Chemical reactions gone wrong, I’m sure we all have experienced this issue, I know I have. You add your reagents in the proper amounts with a suitable solvent and perform your reaction only to find your by-product yield was greater than your product; by a lot. So, what do you do to isolate what little product you created with maximum yield and purity without breaking the proverbial bank on a big flash column and the solvent required for the purification?

For most chemists purifying organic reaction mixtures, normal-phase flash chromatography is the go-to technique. Why not, it is quick, relatively efficient, and can provide relatively high loading capacities if the separation is properly optimized. However, most of these same chemists rely on only two sets of solvents to perform these purifications…

Over the course of my career, I have had terrific interactions with a multitude of chemists discussing chromatography. When it comes to flash chromatography the approaches from these chemists ranged from running generic 0-100% ethyl acetate in hexane gradients to modeled gradients based on tribal knowledge for a type of synthetic molecule to always using TLC for method development to prep HPLC. Each of these techniques are used because they provide some level of success. To me, though, if I spend time and resources synthesizing a highly valuable and unique molecule, then I want to purify the reaction mixture with the best possible method.

The term “Green Chemistry” has become a major part of the science community’s lexicon. When I think about green chemistry and its relationship to flash column chromatography I think of two specific areas where it applies...

Applying green chemistry principals to flash purification is becoming increasingly important.  In this post, I discuss ways to make flash column chromatography greener by reducing solvent use through optimization of gradient shape.

This is a follow-on to my earlier post where I presented some greener alternatives to DCM as a solvent in flash column chromatography.

In previous posts I offered some suggestions to improve the “greenness” of normal-phase flash purification.  As the use of reversed-phase flash purification has increased the past few years I thought I would explore how to potentially make it greener too.

So, with that in mind, let's take a look at the use of acetone in place of acetonitrile as a reversed-phase flash chromatography solvent.

Flash column chromatography is used by between 20 and 40 thousand organic synthesis chemists worldwide, an amazing number. For most of these chemists flash chromatography is an important part of their daily workflow but allocating time for good method development is often not considered, which can lead to less than ideal purification results.

In this post I focus on how allocating just 10 minutes on thin-layer chromatography (TLC) for method development can save you a lot of grief later on.

Choosing a good purification strategy is an important for successful crude compound purification. A major factor in your strategy is choosing between normal-phase or reversed-phase chromatography.  How do you choose?

In this post, I will provide some simple guidance on helping determine which route to take.

A question I hear a lot from chemists is “how much can I load”. The answer is always “it depends on your separation quality”.  At that point I begin asking about the TLC data and purification goals. Purification goal setting should be your first step and the question to answer is – what do I need this purification to achieve? Is the goal high purity, high yield, or some combination.  Remember, you will typically sacrifice purity for high yield and yield for high purity so optimization is an important consideration.

Over the past several decades, the chemical industry has implemented process changes and updated practices in R&D and manufacturing in an effort to reduce liquid and solid lab waste. The pharmaceutical industry in particular has taken steps within their drug discovery labs to reduce solvent use by requiring their chemists to find and implement measures that achieve the corporate environmental goals without curtailing their productivity – quite the challenge.

For most organic reaction mixture purifications the process is fairly straightforward. Use hexane/ethyl acetate or, for polar compounds, DCM/MeOH.  But what do you do if this doesn't work and your compounds are basic organic amines?

In this post, I re-examine the options available to achieve an acceptable organic amine purification when typical separation methods are insufficient.

This, of course, is always one of the first questions an organic, medicinal, or peptide chemist has when starting the research process for a flash chromatography system. Here at Biotage, we receive this question hundreds and hundreds of times a year, likely within the first couple of minutes of any conversation.

Up to six compounds can be easily separated with an automated step-gradient optimizer embedded in modern flash chromatography systems.

Gradients, used in chromatographic methods, assist with chemical separation and elution. They begin with “weak” elution conditions and end with “strong” elution conditions.

In all my years of working with medicinal and organic chemists, I have found that choosing how many grams of silica to use for purification by flash chromatography is something frequently guessed at. Getting the size of the column right is awfully important because using too few grams of silica will doom your purification to failure and using more an optimal mass of the stationary phase means the purification consumes excess silica, solvents, and a chemist's time.

Biotage®, a pioneer in Flash Purification, launched the unique, removable cap SNAP flash chromatography columns in 2007. This beneficial column design feature continues with the newest Biotage flash columns named Sfär columns.