FPLC was developed and marketed in Sweden by Pharmacia in 1982, and was originally called fast performance liquid chromatography to contrast it with HPLC or high-performance liquid chromatography. FPLC is generally applied only to proteins; however, because of the wide choice of resins and buffers it has broad applications. In contrast to HPLC, the buffer pressure used is relatively low, typically less than 5 bar, but the flow rate is relatively high, typically 1-5 ml/min. FPLC can be readily scaled from analysis of milligrams of mixtures in columns with a total volume of 5 ml or less to industrial production of kilograms of purified protein in columns with volumes of many liters. When used for analysis of mixtures, the eluant is usually collected in fractions of 1-5 ml which can be further analyzed (for example, by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) mass spectrometry). When used for protein purification there may be only two collection containers: one for the purified product and one for waste.