Analytical fractionation:

This covers a wide range. It could be the separation of substances which can be determined separately. Another end could be where elution curve profile could be used to features the sample without the determination of concentration of the various ingredients. A classical instance of the first type is the separation of sugars from cellulose hydrolysate. The technique is a very powerful tool for the separation of oligosaccharides with differing number of sugar residues from each other. Maltooligosaccharides holding up to 15 glucose units and polymaltoses along with chain length up to 21 glucose units could be separated from each other on Bio-Gel P2. Sephadex LH-20 gives a very good resolution of lipids and steroids. It has been probable to fractionate an extremely wide range of non- polar lipids on LH-20 in chloroform and they were found to separate primarily according to their molecular size. The conventional liquid chromatography on silica and other materials is unsuccessful for this category of separation. Amino acids could be separated on the tightly cross-linked types of gels.

The most important applications of analytical fractionation come closer to the fingerprint end of the scale with substances overlapping to a large extent. Many biological fluids have been characterized. The most important among these is plasma. The elution behaviour of plasma proteins has been investigated. The normal elution pattern changes strongly under the influence of certain diseases. Thus, this form of chromatography acts as a diagnostic tool.