In my view practical hand for the experiments is all that matters. In our lab we avail both TLC plates manually prepared & also purchased from the market.

If the manually prepared TLC plates showed tailing, mixing of spots, etc then we prefer the commercial TLC plates.

I suggest you to follow the same as per your availability.

The main difference is the resolution of the spots. The commercial TLC are also "super activated", I mean, they are very dehydrated and that could be a important factor to visualize the spots.

If you have an optimum conditions to prepared TLC plate you can get the plate as in market. but you know each company or factory have a trade mark for prepared the goods. so It's better to used commercial plate if you have money.

Few years ago, the commercial TLC plates were not available in our teaching laboratories. So, a beaker was filled with silica gel & chloroform. Every 2 glass slides were immersed ,by using tweezers, in the beaker for a very short time & then taken out & placed on a thick tissue paper to dry (with the coating up of each slide).

When the students did the experiments (determination & comparison of Rf values of solutes, variation of polarity of solvent & its effect on Rf values), the results were as good as the results taken using commercial TLC plates. It worked also because the coating was uniform on each slide & there was no scratch.

The same difference of using your own built car and that built by Mercedes.

The difference is do you have any know-how in doing it by yourself? If not you have to train first. In our Lab my colleagues use home-prepared TLC plates and it work very well. Good luck

In my view practical hand for the experiments is all that matters. In our lab we avail both TLC plates manually prepared & also purchased from the market.

If the manually prepared TLC plates showed tailing, mixing of spots, etc then we prefer the commercial TLC plates.

I suggest you to follow the same as per your availability.

In my opinion if you want to reproduce your results then go for the commercially available TLC because they all are same but at the same time they are comparatively expensive.

If you prepare TLC my yourself then you might not be able to prepare good quality (having uneven coating, bubbles, air space etc) TLC if you are a beginner, which may affect your result.

but you can be a expertise by training and practicing to prepare a fine and same quality TLC.

In my own expericen, I would always suggest you to opt for commercial ones. Many times when we are searching for the app solvent system for separation we are mislead by the manual TLC plates we prepared which will end up in fed up. So, if you are in the way discover the solvent system of separation of your compound with out proper literature then only opt for commercial plates. Merck TLC aluminium plates are good. All the best. 

What has been mentioned by Dr. Teodoro Kaufman is the best answer to this question. It is just similar to learning driving with a local built car and when perfect, drive a mercedes to avoid any accidents and enjoy your ride.

I believe if you are a beginner, then you should learn with the hand made plates and once you are perfect, start using precoated TLC plates to get accurate results. If price is the concern, develop your best solvent system using hand made plates. For final determination and data collection, use the precoated one. In India, the use of hand made plates is slowly getting lesser and lesser. There was a time when people used to make plates using silica gel-G and grind it in a glass pestle and mortar to make a slurry which was poured evenly on a glass plate and so on. Now-a-days this is not the case.

As far as possible, use the precoated plates only. Of course there is a big difference in results. Sometimes the number of spots increases too. Another advantage of using precoated plate is that you cut it and use small pieces of the plates for trial and error purposes. No need to use the whole plate. The result will be accurate. 

Regards 

thank you all for sharing your experiences.

You can use either plate. if budget is a problem, you can make your own TLC plates.use quality silica gel (TLC grade) with binder. try to make a smoth paste of silica in milli Q water. paste should not be very thick or thin. spread it on the glass plates gently using spreader and let it be dry. based on your requirment you can chose the thichness of TLC plate silicagel coating. Dry it and activate it. you will get good results.

Thank you, Dr. Shobha and Dr. Trevor

Dear Garima, i appriciate the suggestions by all here.

But, I would like to add my few following points here

1. If you are developing some methods on TLC and you want them to be available to others then I would recommend you to be using the plates of uniform pore size and compostion. And such plates are commercially available.

2.  You can practice of making such plates at your institute too, but you should also understand about human errors. If you are able to to reproduce such plates then it is not possible that someone else will definitely prepare such plates at their institute.

3. As per ICH (International Conference on harmonization), any analytical method should be validated in such way that it can be used by others too. And I am not sure whether validation of your method will be compltely possible using manually prepared TLC plates.

Hope this would be useful for you and your research. All the best.

It depends on the size of the silica you used for preparing the TLC. Basically no difference but for your home-made one you can decide the thickness yourself. Sometimes it will be convenient when you perform preparative TLC since you make a thick one yourself. 

Thank you Dr. Huang.

Dear Garima

One can not neglect personel errors, which vary person to person. Thats why even working with commerical plate, one have to give validated method.  You can check errors youself by performing TLC on TLC plate prepared by yourself on interday and intraday variations and optimised your method through validation.

An interesting thread ...

There have been a lot of helpful comments here, but what I would like to know is, does someone know a good handbook on home-made TLC preparation? Could you point me to a good literature source on that topic, because I haven't prepared any plates myself and this is somewhat new to me. How do you prepare your plates? What is the procedure?

Thank you for your help guys...

Please watch this..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNDQkM3jasA

Good Luck

I actually watched that this morning and it was surprisingly informative. However, I was hoping to get a literature reference instead maybe. Or is preparation of TLC really as simple as seen in this video? Are there no "small" tricks?

Yes, its as simple as seen in the video..Just take Silica gel (for TLC) dissolve in required solvent or water and just make TLC..and about the tricks, I can say no such tricks but its just the perfection of your working hand to estimate the thickness and uniformity of TLC plates.

Cheers