[The use of high-performance liquid chromatography in biochemical and medical analyses (author's transl)].

The HPLC (high-performance liquid chromatography) is applicable for all biochemical analyses, because of the wide variety of separation principles (adsorption-, partition-, ion-exchange- and steric exclusion-chromatography). Of exceptional importance is the reversed phase technique, a special case of partition chromatography. The sensitivity of detectors depends upon the structure of the respective substance, but is ordinarily lower -- apart from fluorescence detection -- than GLC-detectors. The development of new systems is going on. The HPLC is used in the quantitative determination of plasma levels of drugs and their metabolites. This is of special importance during the development of new drugs and for monitoring therapy. The measurement of concentrations of certain biogenic substances helps in diagnosis. An important field of application of HPLC is the use in sample clean-up for other analytical methods. In this application HPLC surpasses all other chromatographic techniques by fastness, reproducibility and suitability for automation.