“…First, the dead volume, V d , of the column was obtained from the product of the dead time, t d , of the HPLC instrument and the volumetric flow rate, Q (V d = Qt d ); the dead time, t d , of the column was taken to be the measured retention time of the dead-time marker in the system without a column. Next, the average retention times, t R;i (i = 0, 1, 2, …, N), for the dead-time marker (i = 0) and the N polystyrene standards (i = 1, 2, …, N) were obtained from the average of the first moments [26] of the chromatograms from the three repeated measurements for each molecule. The elution volume, V E,i , of molecule i (i = 0, 1, 2, …, N), was simply evaluated as the product of the average retention time, t R;i (i = 0, 1, 2, …, N) and the volumetric flow rate,…”