Flash chromatography is the preferred purification technique of organic, medicinal, natural product chemists, and more recently peptide chemists because it has the power to separate a broad variety of compounds more efficiently than other crude purification techniques such as crashing out of solution or liquid-liquidextraction.
To deliver pure compounds, chemists can manipulate a large variety of variables to accomplish the desired level of purity. Here is a whitepaper which seeks to explain the factors that ensure successful purifications with flash column chromatography. For organic and medicinal chemists, flash chromatography is simply part of synthesis workflow – design the synthesis, perform the synthesis, purify and isolate the desired product or intermediate. Generally, flash chromatography method development gets little thought and chemists rely on the “feel” gained through years of experience for how to purify their synthetic compound mixtures.