This paper is a personal review of the role developments in separation science over the last four decades have played in the diagnosis and understanding of purine and pyridine metabolism particularly in man. In 1967 the separation of nucleotides was used to demonstrate a new chromatography technique. This technique became known as HPLC and which continues to dominate the analysis of purines etc. The resolution and quantitation offered by even the earliest HPLC systems completely changed our understanding of matters such as nucleotide instability in cells and tissues, diagnosis of in born errors, etc. Capillary Electrophoresis also enabled high resolution as well as the quantitation of usual analytes such allantoin. Now LC-MS dominates the diagnostic field. This paper is based on the Anne Simmonds Lecture given by the author at PP17 in Gdansk in 2017.
Keywords: Capillary electrophoresis; HPLC; UPLC; blood urine and tissue sampling.