Class Fractionation of Acidic Glycolipids and Further Separation of Gangliosides by OPTLC

The use of the OPTLC method has been extended to the separation of the acidic fraction of the total lipid extract derived from a given blood element. This newly developed method is suitable for the interclass separation of sulphatides and gangliosides and further intraclass separation of gangliosides on the same TLC plate with step gradient development. The elutions can be performed on 10 × 10 cm (or larger) HPTLC plates with 13 parallels on each one. The chromatograms were stained either with orcinol-H 2 SO 4 to show class separation (in this case only a single isocratic elution was performed) or with rescrcinol-HCl reagent to visualize the ganglioside intraclass separation. The chromatograms were evaluated by spectrodensitometric scanning and the reproducibility of the separation was determined.