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School of Information Technologies and Engineering

Paper Chromatography

Sabir Zeynalli

Chemistry: Lab Report # 1

02/23/2018

Purpose
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The main purpose for doing this experiment was to observe the attitudes of
pigments of spinach and parsley leaves over chromatography paper.

Hypothesis
Pigments of the given leaves (spinach and parsley) are moving over the
chromatography paper, which is pulled in a soluble solvent. The truth behind
this is, there are molecules inside these pigments, and they have some
connection. Pigments are the things that have certain colors. Furthermore,
during the experiment, when these pigment go up, they lose their color, as the
connection between molecules weakens.

Materials and Methods

Materials for this experiment were:
Isopropyl alcohol or acetone, ruler, scissors, pencil, tape, paperclip, beakers,
spinach, parsley leaves, and coin(we will use its edge)

Methodology:
The first thing that we need to do is cutting by half the chromatography paper.
Therefore, the dimension will be 10sm to 10sm. Then we use the ruler for
measuring the lines that we need to draw by pencil. (1 sm from top, 2 sm from
bottom of paper) After doing it we took the spinach leave and placed it on the
bottom line of paper, and by the edge of coin we pressed the spinach for
releasing its pigments. Then we repeated these steps by using parsley leaves,
then we repeated these steps for new spinach and parsley leaves about 5 times.
There is a one point in this experiment, and it is being careful as much as
possible; as, pressing the leave too much will worsen the experiment. After
these procedures, we continued with taped top of our chromatography paper to a
pencil; we used pencil for effective solution, with using pencil taped paper sat
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on top of the beaker so that paper could stand in the beaker and bottom of the
chromatography paper should touch bottom of the beaker. After doing it we get
the data from the experiment and carefully added isopropyl alcohol to the depth
of 1sm. After doing that, we pull pencil taped paper inside the beaker. We saw
that alcohol absorbs the molecules of the spinach or parsley pigments. After
waiting for 20 minutes, we saw that the colors were losing their pigments and
become transparent. Then we took off the paper from beaker, and waited for
drying. Because when it is wet we cannot touch it, as it will make the
experiment and our efforts almost useless. When the paper became dry we
understood that the pigments go up and change their color according to the
connection between the molecules of these leaves.
Distance pigment traveled
The formula for this experiment is: RF = Distance solvent traveled

By this formula we calculated flow rate.

1 cm

4 cm
distance
travelled by
10
solvent
cm

2 cm
Start
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Results

1.6 cm 1.78 cm
Rf parsley = = 0.40 (blue-green) Rf spinach = = 0.45( blue-
4 cm 4 cm
green)
2.38 cm 2.25 cm
Rf parsley = = 0.59 (green yellow) Rf spinach = 4 cm = 0.56 (green
4 cm
yellow)

Conclusion

By doing this experiment we have proven that the color of these leaves are
changing significantly according to the connection between its molecules, and
the other important point was the spinach and parsley leaves has blue-green
colored “chlorophyll a pigments” and green-yellow colored “chlorophyll b
pigments”.