ANATEXIS Archer Martin, who has died aged 92, won the 1952 Nobel Prize for Chemistry jointly with Richard Synge for his invention of partition chromatography, a technique for separating the constituent components of mixtures; it has proved indispensable to scientists in investigating the structures of complex organic substances such as proteins.
Chromatographic analysis had been discovered in 1906 by the Russian-Polish scientist Michael Tsvett, who succeeded in separating the different pigments in an extract of green leaves using "chromatographic columns" - tubes packed with various finely powdered substances through which the pigments travelled at different speeds and eventually separated.
In 1940, Martin and Synge were working for the Wool Industries Research Association, looking for ways to work out the basic structures of proteins by separating and identifying the amino acids contained in them. Their method involved the use of two solvents, for example chloroform and water, and their innovation was to use a solid "support", which made it possible to keep one of the solvents in place, while allowing the other solvent to move across it. By pouring chloroform and the amino acid mixture, stained with methyl orange, down a glass column filled with ground up silica gel and water, they found that the amino acids appeared as red bands as they passed down the column.
Their study, published in 1941, suggested that the resolution of the mixture into its component parts depended on the different partition of the substances (hence the name "partition chromatography") between the water, held stationary by the silica, and the freely moving "mobile" solvent, which could be a gas or a liquid.
Martin, with his colleagues R Consden and A H Gordon, went on to develop the technique using absorbent paper instead of columns. In paper partition chromatography, the paper acts as a flat "column," providing the solid plane on which a stationary solvent and a mobile solvent can interact.
A drop of the solution of amino acids to be analysed was placed at the end of a strip of filter paper, and left to dry. It was then dipped into a solvent, which travelled along the strip by capillary action, taking the various components of the mixture along with it at different rates; when a reagent was added, the chromatogram developed like a photograph, clearly indicating the different components of the solution.
The process enabled the routine isolation and identification of amino acids and nucleic acids, unattainable by column chromatography, and had the added advantage of being quick, simple and economical. Since Martin and Synge made their discovery, there has been an almost explosive growth in the use of chromatography, particularly in the fields of biochemistry and molecular biology, where it has proved especially effective in helping to reveal the structure of giant and complex organic molecules. It was also one of the techniques that led to Frederick Sanger's 1958 Nobel Prize for determining the first amino acid sequence of insulin.
The son of a doctor and a nurse, Archer John Porter Martin was born in north London on March 1 1910. He was so dyslectic that he had to be read to by an older sister until the age of eight. He went to Bedford School, where he won an exhibition to Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1929. It was his intention to become a chemical engineer but, influenced by Professor J B S Haldane, then Reader of Biochemistry at Cambridge, he specialised in biochemistry.
Martin's undergraduate research resulted in a method of detecting pyro-electricity, by observing the attraction of a metal plate for crystals that had been immersed in liquid air. He also worked on ultraviolet adsorption spectra.
He graduated in 1932, and spent a year in the Cambridge physical chemistry laboratory before becoming a researcher at the Dunn Nutritional Laboratory, working under L J Harris and Sir Charles Martin. There he became concerned with the effects of prolonged vitamin E deficiencies and used a crude form of chromatography to isolate the vitamin E in wheatgerm oil. The process, called counter-current extraction, involved distributing the oil between two solvents which do not mix, then moving the solvents in opposite directions. Though it was of no use in identifying the amino acids in proteins, it lay the foundations for his later work in partition chromatography. Martin also worked on the B2 group of vitamin deficiencies in pigs.
He was awarded an MA in 1935, a PhD in 1936, then in 1938 took a post as a biochemist at the Wool Industries Research Association laboratories at Headingley, Leeds, studying the felting and composition of wool, and working with Synge on amino acid analysis. Together they developed existing methods of separating the constituents of mixtures, which led to partition chromatography by "zoning" compounds in a tube packed with starch. This enabled scientists to separate a number of water-soluble compounds, including carbohydrates and amino acids, which were in great demand in the prevention of starvation.
From 1946 to 1948 Martin was head of the biochemistry division of the research department at Boots of Nottingham and in 1948 he joined the staff of the Medical Research Council, first at the Lister Institute and later at the National Institute for Medical Research. He was appointed Head of the Division of Physical Chemistry at the institute in 1952 and he was Chemical Consultant from 1956 to 1959. From 1959 until his retirement in 1970 he worked as a Director of Abbotsbury Laboratories.
Martin was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1950, and appointed CBE in 1960. He received the Berzelius Medal of the Swedish Medical Society, the John Scott Award, the John Price Wetherill Medal, the Franklin Institute Medal and the Leverhulme Medal (1963), and honorary degrees from Leeds and Glasgow.
Archer Martin married, in 1943, Judith Bagenal. They had a son and three daughters.
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