LEGO MINDSTORMS Fraction Collector: A Low-Cost Tool for a Preparative High-Performance Liquid Chromatography System.

Preparative high-performance liquid chromatographic (prep-HPLC) systems are used in many research schemes including purifying products from reaction mixtures, fractionating natural product extracts, and isolating compounds. Manual fraction collection from a prep-HPLC is a common method; however, it often lacks the reproducibility of automated fraction collectors due to human error. Automated fraction collectors for prep-HPLC systems can add thousands of dollars to the cost of prep-HPLC and are thus not always available to budgetary constrained research programs.