[Music] this is the drugs control laboratory where scientists work hard to make sure professional athletes don't cheat and they do that by using a special separation technique in order to see whether or not the athletes have taken drugs that they shouldn't we test their urine because these medications that they may or may not have taken would have left the body in the urine so if we get a urine sample we can then separate out the different components to see what they may or may not have taken the difficult part is that all of the drugs
in the urine are dissolved see here so if we were to filter the urine all of the liquids would go through and there would be no separation achieved and you can see everything's coming through [Music] instead scientists use a technique called chromatography I'll show you a very simple demonstration using a black pen the black pen is made up of several different inks with different colors we can separate the inks using a bit of filter paper and some water the different colored inks travel up the paper at different speeds depending on how much they like water
the same principle is used to separate the substances in urine this machine is used to separate urine by chromatography this piece of column all the separation happens along here we will use this column instead of paper so I have a small sample of our urine from earlier that I will put into the Machine the level takes a very small amount of our sample and injects it onto the column where it will be separated once our substances are separated in the urine they then leave the column to enter or specialized weighing machine which is called a
mass spectrometer where we can identify each substance based on their weight so this is some data that we got from or separated urine we have two different Peaks here which represent two different substances that were in our urine from the graph Danielle can tell whether either of these are banned rugs here in the lab we work together to improve test either making separation happens faster or we can look at smaller amount of drugs just to improve the science to make sports clean [Music]
