INTRODUCTION The purpose of this experiment was to identify the two bodies recovered from separate lakes because the bodies were mixed up at the morgue using the Thin Layer Chromatography (TLC) method. TLC is a technique for separating dissolved chemical substances by virtue of their migration over plastic sheets coated with a thin layer of finely grounded adsorbent silica gel (Encyclopaedia Britannica. Britannica Academic, 2015). It is to support the identity of a compound in a mixture when the retention factor (Rf) of a compound is compared with the Rf of a known compound as a reference. One of the death was natural, where the person had a heart attack and fell into a lake that was polluted with benzamide and expected to have benzophenone in his blood. The structures of benzamide and benzophenone can be found in the figure 1 below, with a…show more content… The blood sample from blood 1 and water sample from pond 1 had traces of benzamide and benzophenone. In addition to, the blood sample from blood 2 and pond 2 belonged to the person that died from a heart attack because the samples had traces of coumarin and naphthalene. Figure 1: The compounds that are analyzed in the crime scene
This TLC lab, was up to standards with green chemistry with using hexane and ethyl acetate as the solute to elute a TLC plate because they are less flammable, toxic, and volatile to its counterparts of acetone, chloroform, etc.
EXPERIMENTAL When starting this experiment, we utilized TLC to analyze the samples from the morgue. All four reference solutions labeled respectively as Blood 1, Blood 2, Pond 1, and Pond 2, was dissolved in about 1 mL of ethanol. Then tiny amounts of each solution was applied to a TLC plate using a microcapillary tube 1 cm near the bottom. The microcapillary tube was rinsed between applications with
