I recently need to separate saturated odd chain fatty acids from even chain fatty acids. As they are radio-labelled. So I cannot analyze them by GC or HPLC. It seems that the only way is to use TLC. But free fatty acids or their methyl esters tend to show as a single band on TLC plates. Silver nitrate TLC can separate FAMEs by unsaturation. Can TLC separate fatty acids by chain length?
Thank you all. @Michael In Canada, at least in my university, it's not allowed to use radioactive materials on GC or HPLC, even I'm only using C14.
You can easily change injection ports, septa, liners, colums and detectors in a GC-FID. Thus, you could use a set of these pieces of equipment exclusively for your assignment, so that your radiactive material would contaminate, yes, but the contaminated material would be used only for this purpose and by nobody else.
The most difficult part for me is how to trap the radioactive CO2 that your FID would liberate. I have no experience with this kind of after-trapping, but I think you can also ask this topic here, in Research Gate.
But I wonder: why do you have to use radioactive material for this in the first place? Since chromatography would be able to separate your fatty acids, why do you have to contaminate your samples with radioactivity? Could you use non-radioactive isotopes and mass spectrometry?
You might be able to do differential crystalizing on a zone refiner. The apparatus cycles many times separating marginally higher melting points and marginally higher crystallinity from the softer waxy mix. The refiner heat source operates outside a closed glass tube which can be placed in radiation containment. High temperature wax for expensive candles is sometimes made in this way.
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