Carotenes and Chlorophyl: Day Twelve

Today we had our first chemistry lab of 2010. I worked with Jessica Eisnor, extracting the pigments from a leaf of spinach to do a thin layer chromatography the following week. We broke up a spinach leaf by using a mortar and pestle, then adding different organic solvents. We used a centrifuge to divide the solution into its components. From here, we took only the dark green part of the solution: the one with all of the pigments needed to do our chromatography. We then made a column to run our crude sample through, we used alumina hydrated by the organic solvent acetone. We eventually broke it into two components one being yellow, and one being green. The green component was composed primarily of chlorophyl, while the yellow was composed mostly of carotenes.