Introduction

Abstract

With the increasing interest in plants and plant-derived compounds, the use of various chromatographic techniques is necessary for the isolation of milligram to gram quantities of pure substances for structural studies, bioassays, pharmacological tests, reference substances and standards for quantitative determinations. When one realises that a plant may contain thousands of chemical constituents, the choice of these chromatographic techniques becomes very significant. Review articles on applicable chromatographic methods abound and publications on the latest developments appear in the “Journal of Chromatography” and similar periodicals. A biennial review on HPLC is published in “Analytical Chemistry”. All the same, a general reference work with the function of grouping together preparative separation techniques is required. This becomes all the more necessary with the array of newlyintroduced chromatographic techniques which are now commercially available.